Category: politics
The happenings here in Trinidad and Tobago, now with (or without) Hart and with (or without) Property Tax Reform and with (or without) a true change in Opposition, amongst the happenings in my personal life, have me in the frame of mind where I am compelled to write about the elephant - or in T&T, the Manicou - in the middle of the room.
Inertia.
If there is a tone of displeasure here, it is warranted from this writer's perspective. How is it that the face of the country has changed so little for me over the decades? In speaking with one journalist a few weeks ago, my observations were echoed by someone who had more insight into what has been happening over the decades here than I. The faces rarely change, the problems remain the same, and the sliding scale of what is celebrated has slid below mediocrity.
I may sound negative, but isn't it somewhat odd that the country takes the day off when the national football team comes back from the World Cup after being eliminated, having scored only one goal - against themselves? I used to say that was celebrating mediocrity, but it isn't. It's celebrating less than mediocrity. It's a celebration of stagnation; a simple wave of enthusiasm was what was celebrated - a simple hope that something would change. Maybe I am become old and jaded. I am unimpressed with the idiocies tossed around like a dead shuttlecock in Parliament and in the rumshops. I have shaken my head over the years as I have seen more and more money poured into bad ideas - ideas that were so patently bad that even John Q. Mediocrity shook his head with the next nip of puncheon. {Read more}
According to the twittersphere, Kamla Persad-Bissessar has won the United National Congress Alliance internal election. For the nosebleed section, that means that Basdeo Panday is no longer running the show.
A lot has been written about this election. A lot has been said about how important it is for a change of leadership or a lack of change of leadership within the UNC-A. All of that stops now - the leadership has changed. As is to be expected, Kamla Persad-Bissessar has a lot of things she now has to live up to.
She should know that I'm not a part of that weight. I've learned over the years not to believe anything said before an election. I didn't vote for her (or the others!) and thus I have the least expectations of her. In this way, I'm probably be her best friend a year or two from now.
That being said, there has been some mention of a coalition between COP and the UNC-A. What it should be, if they want to wedge their way back into the misdirected Westminster system, is a reconciliation between the two groups of supporters. The UNC-A supporters strongly echoed the sentiments of a split vote yet the voices from which they echoed did not openly recognize the fact that the vote was split because people didn't believe they weren't very good at Opposition. If the last two elections have demonstrated anything, it is the lack of popular support of the party parading (barely) as Opposition.
Will Kamla change that? She can't. Not by herself. She'll need support for that. And when this is all said and done, will Kamla still be in charge of Opposition?
No one knows, everyone has an opinion - but Time reveals everything. I'll wait for Time.
A friend asked on facebook recently why our Prime Minister frequently quotes scripture. For example, the PM quoted from the Bible during his wide-ranging contribution in Parliament recently, and also claimed to be "drunk on God."
I tend to think anything a career politician does is linked in some way to politics. Check the statistics on the relative sizes of the constituencies based on the different religions. Click on the People sub-section at T&T's page in the CIA World Factbook - you'll find that the total estimated size of the Christian constituency is nearly 58% (the sum of Roman Catholic (26%), Anglican (7.8%), Baptist (7.2%), Pentecostal (6.8%), Seventh Day Adventist (4%) and other Christian (5.8%)); the Hindu sector is next largest at 23%, and Muslim at 6%.
Perhaps our PM is channelling ex-US President George W. Bush by sounding like a pastor because it's more likely to appeal to the large Christian sector. It is also why you won't find Opposition Leader Basdeo Panday, or any politician who appears to be rooted in the non-Christian community, quoting as frequently from the other holy books (whose constituencies are relatively much smaller).
To a degree, religious belief requires its followers to suspend their logic - no matter what their senses tell them, they're asked to believe in some leader's version of a truth that's subject to human interpretation. It's suspension of belief - belief in your senses must be overridden by faith in something extra that's unseen. {Read more}
I somehow got included on an email (initiated by Kid5Rivers) with a lot of politicians on the list (such interesting email addresses!), and which a few have responded to. I honestly didn't want to read them and after about 10 responses to the email - something about the Silver Fox (Basdeo Panday) - I let them all have a piece of my mind, perhaps to my own future detriment.
Almost everyone I talk to seems to agree that the 'same old khaki pants' is just that - and mixing the parties up doesn't actually do anything because they remain the same people. Do I really need to whip out Ernie and Bert with the cookies again?
I figured I may as well share my response here since I think it needs to be openly discussed:
I have little time for politics as politics has little time for me. My concerns are not serviced by political posturings. I am not alone in this. The people of Trinidad and Tobago have consistently been wronged by the medieval politics that persist. I have been included on this list by someone for a reason. I do not know what their reason is.
That said, and since I must now suffer every person on this list having their say - I will now have mine. First, I must acknowledge that I am happy that this conversation - if indeed it is a conversation instead of competing monologues - is happening. I must also write that I am saddened that this discussion is not happening in a more public forum, but I fear that is simply a sign of the consistent inability of politicians to embrace the democratization possible through technology. Still, we start with a baby step.
{Read more}
I have voted only four times in my life1 - one local government and three national elections. And 100% of my voting pattern can be explained by a single factor - I voted for the Muslim candidate.2 Combine that bit of information with my surname and it's easy to conclude that my vote is driven simply by identity politics.3
It would be easy. But while it would prodict my voting patterns fairly well, but it wouldn't do much to explain why I voted the way I did, nor would it be a useful predictor of future scenarios.
As I mentioned on Monday, saying that "corruption, on its own, does not decide elections in Trinidad: Race does" (as Selwyn Ryan did) turns correlation into causation. Voting patterns and election victories can be explained in terms of race, but saying that "race decides elections" is an oversimplification. Electoral victory depends on a combination of building coalitions and motivating your base. Add to that the fact that we don't have national elections, we have a series of local elections that are won constituency-by-constituency. More to the point, if race decided elections, one would expect that we had experienced substantial demographic shifts over the last 40 years, an expectation that's not supported by the facts. {Read more}
In the Sunday Express, Selwyn Ryan wrote
...Mr Panday is also correct when he notes that corruption, on its own, does not decide elections in Trinidad: Race does...
Taran questioned whether this assumption about Trinidadian politics remains valid, pointing out that
If COP support is an indicator, they don't follow their parents. Sure, they didn't win a seat - but they did cast a wide net on Election Day because something about COP was appealing. It wasn't Winston Dookeran's charismatic speeches. What was it?
If you're interested in predicting outcomes, phenomonological models are good enough. Race, coupled with a few other factors, can explain the outcome of every election since 1956 with the possible exception of 1986. If you consider mixed people as a "swing" constituency, caught between the two races, you've got your model. Figure out how they'll vote/how they voted, and you've predicted or explained your election. It works, it's simple...it's what they call an elegant solution.
The problem with phenomonological models is that they are only interested in emergent patterns, not in the mechanisms that generate those patterns. Correlation, they tell you, does not imply causation. If you want to study the underlying mechanics that create those patterns you need to dig deeper, and look for more complicated models. {Read more}
If you read, "Politics as a Religion in America" and you take the time to consider it in a context of Trinidad and Tobago, you might be surprised.
Consider this from the article:
...Perhaps the single most profound change in our political culture over the last 30 years has been the transformation of conservatism from a political movement, with all the limitations, hedges and forbearances of politics, into a kind of fundamentalist religious movement, with the absolute certainty of religious belief...
And it's that sort of blind faith when it comes to politics that could easily be seen to align or be confused with race in politics. It's a tradition. It doesn't even have to make sense, once it comes from the pulpit of the political. While it's seen most in the PNM and the various renditions of the UNC (which is shopping for a new leader in the future, perhaps), every political party has at least some of the fervor - the evangelism and mostly the 'leap of faith' in believing that the political party that they support actually does things in the interest of the nation.
It's interesting to consider.
Yesterday, Selwyn Ryan wrote, 'The UDeCOTT election: round 1' - and within it he wrote something that should be apparent to anyone who isn't in Parliament:
...Mr Imbert brags that the central issue in the Inquiry will not be UDeCOTT, but the cartelisation of the local construction industry, the nature of the Opposition, and much else. He boasted that "the election will be about who is fit to run the country, which is the best party to run the country, who has the moral authority to run the country, and who is best equipped to serve the people of the country". The problem, however, is that none of the parties, including the PNM, is seen as having any abundance of these qualities...
Exactly. But the next sentence is disturbing:
...Mr Panday is also correct when he notes that corruption, on its own, does not decide elections in Trinidad: Race does...
I don't know that Basdeo Panday actually said that race wins elections, and it's a little disturbing to consider that it could be true... and that it could be considered true enough for a politician to say. Was it true? Of course it was. Lets just say that when it comes to race in politics, Trinidad and Tobago has a colourful past. We all know it. There are people who will talk bad about a political party, but when it comes to election day people are likely to vote with their raw prejudice. {Read more}
Trinidadians have a habit of going abroad for a little while, taking in the outside world, turning around and coming home with the belief that they now know more than all the poor people who stayed behind. In their return they became the new colonialists, taking upon themselves the “white man's burden” to educate and civilise the the ignorant natives.
Trinidadians also have a habit of accepting things the way they are. Taran has written about his disdain for the phrase “this is Trinidad”. But fatalism aside, most people who search for solutions are constrained by their experience. It's really difficult to imagine something that's outside of your experience. The search for solutions requires an understanding of alternatives. And we are badly in need of solutions.
I think there's a useful path that lies somewhere between those two options. I don't believe that I know better than others. I'm old enough to have gotten over that arrogance. (OK, maybe age isn't the issue – Eric Williams was older than I am when he came home and “put down his bucket”. But I don't think he ever outgrew his arrogance.)
I don't presume to have answers. I've been out of Trinidad long enough that I don't presume to fully understand the questions any more. I'm not a historian, I'm not a political scientist. My observations and interpretations may be entirely incorrect. But if I'm lucky, I've made a few observations that someone will find useful, or at least in my wrongness I may help someone clarify their own ideas about one issue or another.
Normally I avoid the topic of politics. People who know me know why; I consider politics to be an abstraction of the actual issues - and in Trinidad and Tobago, as well as everywhere else in the world, the level of abstraction related to issues is too high. We need to get back to the issues.
Everyone has been abuzz with Calder Hart, UDECOTT, corruption Chinese workers and... well, the Beetham Gardens incident is largely forgotten. It's all rather amusing when viewed from a distance, but some interesting things have happened.
Keith Rowley's gone on the offensive in a large way. UDECOTT Worse than Piarco tells that story well, and Mr. Rowley's been pressing the point home on Facebook - where he's got 366 people presently following him; a small figure yet respectable in its own way. That few people seems more real than the many renditions of Patrick Manning on Facebook. And Rowley's allegations, spoken from a soapbox of his own personal vindication, is damning in its own way.
For better or worse, that splits the PNM base between the blind followers and those who are paying attention. And this is good for a number of reasons: {Read more}
- The moral basis against corruption should trump law. Trinidad and Tobago has a poor track record when it comes to that, and while it might be nice to say that it's as bad in other nations one should wonder whether mediocrity is a worthwhile goal. Of course, celebrating a football team that scores one goal - against itself - in the World Cup speaks volumes...
- That people are being encouraged to think critically by Rowley.
- COP and UNC supporters feel as though they've won something (though they, too, have lost ).
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