Category: politics
I first asked this question in the run-up to the recent General Elections and got a few responses. The general conclusion then was that voters only have the power to hold their representatives truly accountable when they stain their fingers in a polling station (or to a lesser extent in internal party elections, e.g. UNC, or leaving to form your own party, like COP). This power becomes diminished when we revert to traditional voting patterns of supporting the status quo despite their poor performance.
A recent discussion on facebook has added to this discussion, so I'm throwing it back out for response.
The Original Poster (OP) on facebook said: "I have always supported accountability and transparency in public office. My question to all who are now so rigid in this belief is: where was this strong requirement for accountability and 'holding government to their word' crusade during the last 8 years when the previous government was running this country with none of this? Did anyone attempt to make a complaint? Ask a question and got a satisfactory answer? Approach a Minister or MP for answers or demand action? Actually got in touch with a Minister or MP to ask a question or demand an action? We must all hold the [People's Partnership] very accountable for their actions and promises, but be honest and remember this is something that no other government offered in the past." {Read more}
My perspective shifted when I realized I was a year older than the appointed Attorney General. There's a line from John Mayer's 'Waiting On The World To Change' that sprang to mind:
...One day our generation Is gonna rule the population ...
Reality sets in. It's only the Attorney General. The majority of them are still the generation or two before me, including the Prime Minister herself. The Attorney General is the warning light, though. It means people of my generation are going to be governing Trinidad and Tobago - even Barack Obama is 10 years older than me. But it has started. Soon, very soon, it's going to be people of my generation.
Like the generation before me who went to school with Patrick Manning and his sisters and who remember the one who died, a sad story. The generation that used to drink with Bas. My father's generation knew these people in a way that was intimate. But people of my generation and younger never shared that intimacy. To many of us, these faces became like the characters on Sesame Street1: sometimes as amusing, sometimes seemingly close but in reality always very distant. They don't look at our generations as equals, they view us as children. And maybe, at least for some, the reverse is true. How we view that generation before might vary from person to person but no one can deny that it is different than viewing a peer.
These people influenced how we saw their generation.
Soon enough, there will be more peers there. And how our generation behaves will determine how the next generations will view us.
And the reason I write this: {Read more}
I started picking through the manifestos - both here and here. And when I started, I fully intended to complete a good fact check on each manifesto. To some degree, I have - and honestly, after a few days of staring at the 'contents' of each manifesto... I'm somewhat disgusted. So I stopped.
But my disgust isn't really so much about the contents as much as it is about people's reactions to the contents. This week, fortunately, we saw some dueling rhetoric between the political parties about manifestos. And that is healthy. But all of that assumes that a large number of people in the country don't read and are incapable of critical thought. And that is an insult to a lot of people that I know - and the education system of Trinidad and Tobago. Or maybe it isn't an insult. Maybe it's a description. And maybe that's why I am disgusted.
Or maybe I'm disgusted because these manifestos are the best that either political party could come up with - or would come up with. Lets be serious - at the end of the day these are politicians who aren't known for living up to their promises.
But I must compare myself to the politicians here and find myself of their ilk. I said I would do something and I didn't complete it. The good news is that no one of the readers voted for me.
That said, the PNM manifesto reads more like a CV than a manifesto, complete with exaggeration and innuendo like so many well written CVs. But at an interview, employers can weed that out. In an election, the interviewers typically don't - and the PNM counted on that. {Read more}
This general election has seen the most social media usage in the history of Trinidad and Tobago. On Facebook, I've been getting more friend requests from politicians than pretty women - a horrible thought in my book with aged politicians wanting to be my friend for political expediency. Ahh, the trials and tribulations of being on Facebook...
Humor aside, there has been a lot of web advertising and social media advertising. There has been a lot of discussion by people regarding the candidates and issues, from Twitter to Facebook to the larger thing called the internet. And, for the most part, it's good. In fact it can be downright entertaining at times.
But something is missing.
Interaction.
It isn't as if the politicians themselves are reading these sites, what is being said and who is saying it - I'm fairly certain that some assistant, far removed from the actual politician, is the one parading as the politician on the Internet. So the politicians are simply using social media as a method of broadcasting instead of using the tool for interacting with people. To them, it seems, social media is exactly like the cars with loudspeakers they have playing jingles at a few thousand decibels.
And that is probably one of the largest problems with politicians in general and specifically in Trinidad and Tobago - they give the illusion of being close to the people when in fact they are as distant as they ever were.
They want your vote and are willing to have one of their lackeys broadcast at you. But interact? Oh, no. They might have to respond. And they are scared of that... and maybe they're scared of the people they say they want to represent unless they alone have the microphone.
Finally, with the People's Partnership Manifesto out, we can stand both manifestos side by side.
The People's Partnership Manifesto is available here (3 megabytes)- it was just released today.
The People's National Movement Manifesto is available here (20 megabytes). It was released earlier this week.
[Update: 2007 manifestos that Edmund Gall posted can be found here.]
That said, I've already skimmed both manifestos and I know that at KnowTnT.com we'll have some commentary on the manifestos.
My first comment: While the People's Partnership got their manifesto up later and didn't upload at the launch as they claimed on the UNC website, they did manage to make their web manifesto more manageable to deal with. Size on the web matters, and being more than 6 times less the size of the PNM Manifesto, it demonstrates a level of technical competence that should be taken for granted in a modern society.
According to members of the new political coalition in T&T, Mr Calder Hart is expected to return to the country on Monday 3rd May 2010 to be formally charged with perjury. The COP's Vernon de Lima is reported to have said:
"We understand that an application will thereafter be made to gag discussion on issues relating to Calder Hart. That means to say that a judge of the High Court will be approached by application that an order be made that nobody in Trinidad and Tobago, including any politician, any newspaper, media, can say anything about Mr Hart, having regard to the fact that he is under criminal charge ...That application will be made ex parte - that is without the judge hearing the input of anybody else but Mr Hart’s attorney."
So there is fear that, if the ex parte gag order is granted, from 03 May 2010, no-one will be able to write or mention Mr Calder Hart in the media without risking legal sanctions. If this were true, perhaps the realms of eastern royalty and magic can provide a suitable workaround.
The country of Thailand has implemented lèse majesté laws since 1908. Lèse majesté is the crime of violating majesty, an offense against the dignity of a reigning sovereign or against a state. There is current turmoil amongst the business class of Thailand relating to their fear of a destabilising royal succession - the current, widely beloved King of Thailand is 82 years old and his prospective successors aren't all popular - but the lèse majesté laws discourage frank talk about it. According to the Economist's leader on 20 Mar 2010, "As father fades, his children fight": {Read more}
Funny how life unfolds. Two weeks after writing how one should judge exiting the political stage, there are events causing me to ponder on political entries.
An unfolding campaign issue is the resignation of High Court judge Herbert Volney and early retirement of Acting Senior Magistrate Ramraj Harripersad in order to run for political office in this year's General Election as potential UNC candidates. The Hon. Prime Minister raised concerns about the effect this may have had on the judiciary, especially with regards to judgements against the government, and Chief Justice Ivor Archie expressed a number of concerns regarding the perception of impartiality. Head of the Law Association, Martin Daly, is due to release their official stance on this in the coming days.
While I await further information from folks in legal circles, I have some questions as an observer.
If there's a risk of bias when one goes from being a judge to being a politician, why should it not exist in the other direction? For example, why should one not be concerned about Gillian Lucky's current ability as a temporary judge given her previous career as a politician?
If the matter is about timing - between exiting the judiciary and entering politics - why should a period of time reduce the perceived risk of bias during the judicial career? Further, if time does reduce the risk, how much time is enough time? {Read more}
I'm sure I missed some inconvenient truths in here. Feel free to add to this in the comments.
Unlike a lot of people here in Trinidad and Tobago, I don't watch television. I'm immune to televised rhetoric. The radio in the pickup, once 95.1 FM started playing Patrick Manning's jingle - a late entry for road march, no more - caused the CD player to take over my amusement. The newspapers, as much as I appreciate the media, haven't really seemed to try to make issues the forefront. Yet?
In my sojourns throughout Trinidad, I try to get a feel for people's sentiments. I've met the die hard UNC's along with the die hard PNM's. I've met fellow politically disenfranchised - perhaps I gravitate to them and vice versa. I've read a stab at the addition of information technology into someone's political manifesto which wasn't too bad and yet wasn't very inspiring.
I got a coke in a plastic bottle at Burger King today because Gulf City continues not having water. In line, I explained the situation to another queued and mentioned that the women's room has water for the washing of hands and yet it seems men don't need to wash their hands. We laughed at the idiocy but how often has water actually come up in the election?
Politics be damned. People need water.
Moving right along - the Aluminium Smelter. Someone said that if the UNC/COP won, the smelter would be stopped and I told them that the UNC started the whole smelter thing anyway. It's unpopular to say, but it's true. So I have doubts that an allied victory will make the smelter suddenly blow away. And years ago, I found out that at least some of the land discussed was cleared for Industrial development in the 1970s. Don't like the smelter? Maybe something more noxious will move in unless the zoning is changed. {Read more}
BC Pires, in his usual eloquent style, wrote about Ishmael Samad's recent protest against Calder Hart. I think we can expand on his list of persons that Ishmael should aim his sledgehammer at.
Swing at Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira, who side-stepped questions about UDeCOTT on C TV's breakfast show earlier this week by saying none of her constituents raised it as an issue in her many walkabouts since 2007. She actually said she can't understand how folks could accuse the PNM of squandermania. Whisper UDeCOTT and all PNM representatives break eye contact. Ishmael will have to pick one reason for swinging because, frankly, the Finance Minister has given so many in her shortened term of office, his arm might dislocate if he swiped at everything she did.
A special swipe is reserved for the PNM Youth Vice Chairman, Mr Adrian Winter, who appeared on the same breakfast show after the Finance Minister to support her vacuous statement with one of his own. He advised youths to ignore the UDeCOTT issue with the phrase: 'Leave it to the older people!' For all we know, his university lecturers must be swinging their heads against a wall seeing this product of their teaching on national TV. So, to Mr Winter, youths are old enough to vote but not old enough to say how they feel about corruption. Somebody should ask him to return his degree. {Read more}
After reading Taran Rampersad's commentary on the need for politicians to focus on the issues, and a facebook note from another friend calling for a weekly town hall meeting he called the Peoples' Parliament, I think an enterprising media house in T&T may be able to satisfy both needs with one solution.
Every Thursday evening from 10:35 p.m. (after the nightly news), except during Easter, Summer and Christmas breaks, the BBC's David Dimbleby, who knows a lot about history and politics, moderates a show called Question Time, which is exactly what you proposed. It is shown on the main BBC channel, BBC One, and also via their website (for free!). They travel around so the show is carried live (or a few minutes delayed - but there is no editing) from a different town/constituency each week.
The public applies to attend the event, and those who attend submit their questions to David when they show up - so the public asks the questions and the panellists don't know what the questions are beforehand. Since questions are usually to do with national topics, or major topics affecting the region/town visited that week, all panellists must be aware of the main national issues. As a result, while a party rep may deflect questions that a personal to a particular minister, they can't get away from saying what is their party's view on the issue and how their policies affect it. So the nonsense that passes for the weekly T&T post-Cabinet Meeting press conference won't be accepted - if you are present on the panel, you must be prepared to answer even if you're not the direct line minister involved. {Read more}
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