The Italian Renaissance philosopher and statesman, Niccolò Machiavelli, described as an immoral cynic, a genius strategist and a wicked man inspired by the devil, famously maintained that politics has no relation to morals.
Facing an onslaught of corruption allegations, Basdeo Panday, the fifth Trinidad and Tobago (TT) Prime Minister, a veteran politician, trade unionist and lawyer nicknamed the “Silver Fox,” would knowingly repeat the matching maxim on a campaign platform during that country’s 2002 general elections the second in as many years that cemented his loss of power after six years at the tumultuous helm, concluding “Politics has its own morality.”
Governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society, Machiavelli claimed, drafting his masterpiece, “The Prince” after he was banished from his beloved Florence. Now we are finding out from the embattled Government of Guyana that local politics also has a startling mathematics of its own. Since it is down for the count and still in office some two weeks after the motion of no-confidence was carried, when backbencher, Charrandas Persaud suddenly defected in a stunning act that seems more Canada cut than clean conscience, the coalition APNU+AFC administration has argued he was bribed by Opposition Leader, Bharrat Jagdeo without offering any evidence, concrete, numerical or satellite. Persaud seems pure proof, like Machiavelli stressed that “One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived” even as the Coalition seemingly subscribes to “the promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.”
People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) executive Aubrey Norton would charge outright that Jagdeo in fact “colluded with forces in Trinidad and mobilised resources to bribe a sitting Member of Parliament in pursuance of his hunger for wealth and power with the hope that APNU+AFC government will not be able to prosecute him and his former Ministers who have criminally pillaged the Guyana Treasury.”
Reinterpreting the country’s Constitution, ignoring calls to resign, pressing the Speaker of the National Assembly, Dr. Barton Scotland to instead reverse his ruling, key figures in the Government have gone beyond an equally immortal comment from TT’s founding Prime Minister, Dr. Eric Williams, that one from ten leaves nought. They have advanced to complex calculus that defies common comprehension by most of the primary populace stuck with only basic arithmetic skills, claiming half of 65 is 34 while insisting that a simple majority in a 65-member Parliament is anything but absolute, but certainly not 33.
The English poet and writer, G.K. Chesterton observed in his book, “The Man Who Was Thursday” that “It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.” He wrote, “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front…”
A large man, standing over six feet and weighing nearly 300 pounds, G.K’s girth gave rise to a famous story. During the First World War a lady in London asked why he was not “out at the Front?” He replied, “If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.” He once remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw, “To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England.” Shaw retorted, “To look at you, anyone would think you have caused it.”
Obviously, in feast or famine, this is a regime that is so thorough they do not accept half-measures and irrational numbers. Like the mathematicians who are afraid of negative numbers our ruling politicians will apparently stop at nothing to avoid federating and losing some of their functions, apparently believing that a negative image is infinitely better than an uncertain future of Absolut power and an impromptu poll a year and a half too early. After all possession is nine-tenths of the law. The sines of the times to come don’t look so promising either, especially with the country’s Executive President ill and away in Cuba for ongoing cancer treatment, and no clear level-headed successor in sensible sight, as legal challenges loom, Venezuelan aggression alarmingly escalates over yet untapped billions of barrels of coveted Guyana oil with each passing day of predictable uncertainty there and here, and the opportunistic Opposition rubs its’ already slippery hands.
American General Douglas MacArthur declared, “old soldiers never die; they just fade away” in his April 19, 1951 farewell address to the United States Congress, prompting the disgraced former President Richard Nixon to offer his version in a 1980 interview with Barbara Walters on ABC’s 20/20, “old politicians usually die, but they never fade away.” So too, old programmers never die, they just branch to a new address, old policemen never die, they just cop out, and old pilots never die, they just ascend to a higher plane.
Now 85, the wily, bespectacled Panday with his full head of white hair, has stepped away from the main political stage into the shadows showing no signs of shuffling off this mortal coil other than on a Caribbean Airlines flight to Europe, perhaps reflecting on better times when his party the United National Congress (UNC) won the 2000 polls. A year later, three of its Parliamentarians Ramesh Maharaj, Trevor Sudama, and Ralph Maraj would allege government corruption, pressuring Panday to appoint a Commission of Inquiry. Panday responded by promptly firing Maharaj. Sudama and Maraj then resigned, leaving the UNC with a minority. Panday was forced to call a new election, resulting in an unprecedented 18-18 tie between the UNC and the Opposition People’s National Movement (PNM), sparking a constitutional crisis over who should form the government. Both parties agreed to abide by the decision of the then President, A.N.R. Robinson, as to who would lead, but when Robinson appointed PNM leader Patrick Manning based on Manning’s “moral and spiritual values,” Panday protested that Robinson did not act in accordance with the Constitution and he refused to accept the position of Opposition Leader. Parliament was dissolved, and new elections were called in 2002, leading to the return of the PNM to office. Panday’s third term as Leader of the Opposition would last until 2006, when he was convicted of failing to declare a bank account in London.
As Machiavelli reminded us five centuries ago, “It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.”
ID worries about the front of the anonymous Trinidad forces and recalls Panday’s belief, “In politics, get them before they get you.” Dissatisfied with the media he refused to sign the Declaration of Chapultepec, affirming press freedom, explaining he would not endorse it until the pact repudiated the “untrammelled right of the press to publish anything it wants.”
