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Thursday, May 22, 2025

The PM’s op-ed on the Assembly’s mandate–Part 2

by

Dr Winford James
746 days ago
20230507
Dr Winford James

Dr Winford James

In last week’s col­umn, I syn­op­sised that Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley used his op-ed to give the na­tion an un­help­ful two-pronged mes­sage on the re­sults of the last THA elec­tions and the sub­se­quent col­lapse of the PDP in of­fice. The PDP buried the PNM un­der an avalanche of 14 of the 15 seats but found them­selves out of the THA, with 13 of their As­sem­bly­men re­sign­ing from the par­ty–that is to say, from Wat­son Duke him­self–re-form­ing them­selves in­to a group of ‘In­de­pen­dents’, and mov­ing to form a new po­lit­i­cal par­ty.

The first prong of the PM’s mes­sage was that the In­de­pen­dents had lost their man­date and must ac­quire a new one through fresh elec­tions. And the sec­ond was that they must ac­cept the lim­its of the law in the way they gov­ern. But nei­ther prong is de­vel­oped to pro­vide a help­ful analy­sis of how fresh elec­tions can fix the prob­lem of a lost man­date or en­light­en the pub­lic about the ad­van­tages to To­ba­go and the coun­try at large of stick­ing to the lim­its of the cur­rent House of As­sem­bly Act.

Dr Row­ley was mired in a tra­di­tion­al per­spec­tive: you lose your man­date, go back to the polls (even if the act does not re­quire you to), and the law must be obeyed be­cause it is the law (even if it does not give you the free­dom to op­er­a­tionalise your re­spon­si­bil­i­ties un­der the Fifth Sched­ule).

There were no big ideas from his per­spec­tive–even though he had a big of­fice to re­source the op-ed. It was, as he de­clared at the out­set of his first term in 2015: he wasn’t in­ter­est­ed in chang­ing the rules.

And yet, if on­ly be­cause there’s a large con­stituen­cy in To­ba­go that in­sist oth­er­wise, he must, as Prime Min­is­ter, ar­gue the mat­ter with the peo­ple. Need­less to say, there are many elec­tors in the 13 dis­tricts rep­re­sent­ed by the In­de­pen­dents who do not con­sid­er that a man­date is lost sim­ply be­cause rep­re­sen­ta­tives have lost their par­ty; and, fur­ther, all 13 of the In­de­pen­dents seem to have an in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the law that is dif­fer­ent from Dr Row­ley’s.

If Dr Row­ley were re­al­ly in­ter­est­ed in bet­ter de­mo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nance of not on­ly To­ba­go’s af­fairs but al­so the coun­try’s, he would have sit­u­at­ed his po­lit­i­cal­ly fair call for fresh THA elec­tions on the need for gov­er­nance re­forms that would lead to re­al au­ton­o­my and not on the Chief Sec­re­tary’s op­por­tunis­tic par­ty-form­ing sched­ule. Sim­ply in­stalling a new gov­ern­ment–any new gov­ern­ment–to op­er­ate in the same le­gal frame­work would on­ly hard­en our au­to­crat­ic ap­proach­es to gov­er­nance over the last 43 years of THA ex­is­tence and 63 years of na­tion­al gov­ern­ment since In­de­pen­dence. It would on­ly em­bold­en the prac­tice of dic­ta­tor­ship ev­i­dent in the Cab­i­net and the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil.

The Prime Min­is­ter should have been fo­cused on what leg­isla­tive changes are need­ed to ush­er in rep­re­sen­ta­tive over­sight and end dic­ta­to­r­i­al fi­at. Cur­rent­ly, and in con­tin­u­a­tion of his­tor­i­cal prac­tice, the As­sem­bly is al­most com­plete­ly an ex­ec­u­tive body. There’s no over­sight be­cause there aren’t enough elect­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives to pro­vide it, there be­ing few­er peo­ple out­side the Ex­ec­u­tive than in­side it.

And even if there were enough peo­ple out­side the Ex­ec­u­tive to con­trol the out­comes of any vote, these peo­ple would need law-mak­ing pow­ers to force the Coun­cil to fol­low the in­struc­tions of the vote. Law-mak­ing pow­ers are need­ed to cre­ate au­ton­o­my, but cur­rent­ly, the THA can on­ly pro­pose bills; it can­not make laws be­cause that is a pre­serve of the na­tion­al Gov­ern­ment/Par­lia­ment.

It is clear that, in or­der to gov­ern well, there must be over­sight with­in the cham­ber of the ac­tions of the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil and the As­sem­bly it­self needs law-mak­ing pow­ers.

Dr Row­ley, as PM, should have en­gaged us on these mat­ters, in­tro­duced the leg­isla­tive changes, then do the po­lit­i­cal work to get Far­ley to call the elec­tions. 

Win­ford James is a re­tired UWI lec­tur­er who has been analysing is­sues in ed­u­ca­tion, lan­guage, de­vel­op­ment, and pol­i­tics in Trinidad and To­ba­go and the wider Caribbean on ra­dio and TV since the 1970s. He al­so has writ­ten hun­dreds of columns for all the ma­jor news­pa­pers in the coun­try. He can be reached at jay­win­ster@gmail.com

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