Max­ie Cuffie

"If you go in­to of­fice with a goal to un­do the ne­glect of the past by cre­at­ing ne­glect for the fu­ture, you're in trou­ble."

For­eign Af­fairs Min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an, Sun­day Ex­press, De­cem­ber 9, 2012.

Well then, this Gov­ern­ment is in trou­ble.

My friend Vidya's (not her re­al name) Face­book post of Sep­tem­ber 21, 2012, put it blunt­ly: "Good lord! PN­Mites talk­ing about eth­nic cleans­ing in the Gov't ser­vice. Where were they when the PNM was do­ing it to In­do-Tri­nis? No­body said a thing then.

Every sin­gle one stayed silent and al­lowed it to hap­pen thus be­com­ing com­plic­it in the crime against an en­tire eth­nic group. In the years that it was tak­ing place, no com­men­ta­tor, writer, ra­dio per­son­al­i­ty dis­cussed it, aired it, ex­pressed con­cern about it.

"Now that it hap­pen­ing (and I am pret­ty darned sure it is) from the oth­er side we all must take no­tice. Sor­ry, not sure if there is any­one out there will­ing to be the big­ger per­son. Too much anger and pain. Peo­ple want to right the wrong. They may be wrong to do it but the PNM called this on them­selves. And be sure, they will do it again when they are back in of­fice. Two wrongs don't make a right but that is how pol­i­tics is played in this coun­try and when the 'we' are in pow­er dise (that is) how 'we' like it."

An­oth­er friend of mine, a young black pro­fes­sion­al who has man­aged to hold on to a pub­lic-ser­vice job for which he is overqual­i­fied, com­plained two weeks ago that he had topped the in­ter­views for at least two ex­ec­u­tive-lev­el po­si­tions, but when as part of the of­fi­cial process, his name (a non-In­do-Trinida­di­an one, to use the Prime Min­is­ter's ter­mi­nol­o­gy) was for­ward­ed to the re­spec­tive min­is­ters, it had gone no fur­ther.

In one case he even had an e-mail of­fer­ing the job to him and the apolo­gies when it was dis­cov­ered that the min­is­ter found him un­suit­able.

Vidya's views are symp­to­matic of what in­forms the PP po­si­tion on gov­ern­ment re­cruit­ment, and the rest of the pop­u­la­tion needs to come to terms with the re­al­i­sa­tion that "We will rise" meant that, with pol­i­tics be­ing the ze­ro-sum game that it is, some­one has to take the fall, cre­at­ing the po­ten­tial for what Dook­er­an has de­scribed as "ne­glect for the fu­ture."

This is why this coun­try's High Com­mis­sion­er to Ja­maica, Her Ex­cel­len­cy Dr Iva Gloudon, seemed to have such dif­fi­cul­ty re­spond­ing to the ed­i­to­r­i­al by the Ja­maica Ob­serv­er on "eth­nic stock­ing," the ap­point­ment of un­qual­i­fied and oth­er­wise un­suit­able peo­ple to sig­nif­i­cant po­si­tions un­der the PP ad­min­is­tra­tion on the ba­sis of eth­nic­i­ty.

For while Gloudon ac­cused the news­pa­per of lack­ing "over­all un­der­stand­ing of the com­plex­i­ty of gov­er­nance in the Caribbean," and said that the ed­i­to­r­i­al was be­ing viewed with "re­gret and dis­ap­point­ment," at no point did Gloudon point out, say or even in­fer that the ob­ser­va­tions made by the Ja­maica Ob­serv­er were not true.

It al­so ex­plains why the Gov­ern­ment's re­sponse to the ed­i­to­r­i­al came from its pre-em­i­nent In­do-cen­trist Su­ruj Ram­bachan, a man who has in this year alone pub­lished two books, the ninth, in a se­ries based on the Hin­du epic The Ra­mayana, on­ly re­leased last week.

Giv­en the de­mands of his sched­ule as Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter and au­thor, and the fact that his port­fo­lio re­spon­si­bil­i­ties gave him no lo­cus stan­di on the is­sue, it was in­struc­tive that Ram­bachan was cho­sen to out­line the Gov­ern­ment's of­fi­cial po­si­tion.

For­eign Af­fairs Min­is­ter Dook­er­an was (for­tu­nate­ly for him) abroad and giv­en the Cab­i­net re­ac­tion to his last state­ments while out­side the coun­try, we can as­sume his per­son­al po­si­tion as ar­tic­u­lat­ed to the Sun­day Ex­press, al­though not re­flec­tive of the Cab­i­net view, still stands.

Act­ing For­eign Af­fairs Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal, how­ev­er, could on­ly en­dorse Ram­bachan's com­ments and Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar disin­gen­u­ous­ly shift­ed the goal­post by point­ing to the "un­prece­dent­ed di­ver­si­ty" in her Cab­i­net, when what was be­ing re­ferred to by the ed­i­to­r­i­al was the un­prece­dent­ed lack of di­ver­si­ty in the state ap­point­ments made by her Cab­i­net.

It is an im­por­tant is­sue for na­tion­al dis­cus­sion, rather than knee-jerk re­ac­tion, since this coun­try's vi­sion state­ment is con­tained in our an­them as­pi­ra­tion "where every creed and race finds an equal space" and in our mis­sion state­ment "To­geth­er We As­pire, To­geth­er We Achieve." The Gov­ern­ment has a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to ex­am­ine whether the claims are valid.

To be fair to the PNM, Patrick Man­ning did just that when he ap­point­ed Profs John La Guerre and Sel­wyn Ryan to ex­am­ine the claims of in­equitable hir­ing in the state sec­tor in 1993.

A lot has changed in the gen­er­a­tion since then, al­though clear­ly not fast enough, so much so that even Man­ning's job be­came more eas­i­ly avail­able to In­do-Trinida­di­ans. For the last 26 years, the PP in its var­i­ous in­car­na­tions (NAR, UNC/NAR, and UNC) has been in pow­er for al­most 15, as op­posed to the 11 for the PNM, but the nar­ra­tive still speaks as if the PNM has been in pow­er for 50 years, which sug­gests the per­cep­tion is tak­ing some time to catch up with the re­al­i­ty.

Of course, the Prime Min­is­ter has point­ed out that there is no cause for con­cern, giv­en that her Gov­ern­ment, un­der a pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion, cre­at­ed the Equal Op­por­tu­ni­ty Com­mis­sion that was put in place un­der the PNM. One as­sumes we should take com­fort in that even though the chair­man and the CEO of the EOC, and the chair­man and reg­is­trar of the EOC Tri­bunal, re­spon­si­ble for ad­ju­di­cat­ing its de­ci­sions, are all In­do-Trinida­di­ans.

Max­ie Cuffie runs a me­dia con­sul­tan­cy, In­te­grat­ed Me­dia Com­pa­ny Ltd, is an eco­nom­ics grad­u­ate of the UWI and holds an MPA from the Har­vard Kennedy School as a Ma­son Fel­low in Pub­lic Pol­i­cy and Man­age­ment.