Don’t change Constitution, educate the people - Lloyd Best
Stabroek News
February 22, 2003
(Trinidad Express) Perhaps it was the general dystopian air pervading the nation, perhaps it was the Carnival noise from the Savannah filtering in through the window, but whatever it was, it caused Lloyd Best to desert his normal sangfroid for some very strong language in making his proposals about constitutional reform to a small gathering at the National Museum on Tuesday night.
The event was a panel discussion on the subject organised by the Clifford Sealy Memorial Foundation.
Other panelists included former senior civil servant, J O’Neill Lewis and political analyst, Kirk Meighoo.
Lewis led off the discussion by reminding the audience that the urge to constitutional reform seemed to operate according to a ten-year cycle in Trinidad-which he dubbed the “ten-year syndrome”. He recalled that other attempts had been made at constitutional reform, of which the most recent was the Hyatali Commission of 1990, which report had never been made public, or laid in Parliament.
Meighoo, following Lewis, apprised the gathering of a report prepared by the sitting Independent Senators containing suggestions for constitutional reform, which had been presented to President Arthur NR Robinson on Monday.
Meighoo noted the strangeness of a presentation to the media before the report’s being laid in Parliament, and quoting from an interview with Prof Ramesh Deosaran in the newspapers that day, said the some of the recommendations identified in the article were already in existence.
The Senators’ recommendations included the American-style election of a president by national popular vote; the “disengagement” of the prime minister from the parliament; the election of constituency representatives from within the constituency and not aligned to parties; and finally that Cabinet should be responsible to the legislature.
Meighoo said the different mode of election of the prime minister was the only innovation.
The problem, said Meighoo, was the nature of power in the society which vested absolute power in one individual.
Best continued on this issue describing the central problem which he said the society, and the political scientists and academics at the university, (which he described as “a morgue”) seemed incapable of realising.
The problem, he said, is not the law: it is in the attitude of the people to power: “If the people understood why we need constitutional reform, we wouldn’t need constitutional reform. The country and economy are embedded in particular social arrangements. People are semi-literate and half-educated - this is not to be insulting, it is to describe a condition - they live happily day to day, and think ‘we don’t need to read’, and are happy with authoritarianism. The central task is to activate the people to think.”
Best noted that the parliamentary system in use in Trinidad works quite well in places as diverse as Canada, India and Australia with very little modification, so the problem was not in the laws. He said there was too much emphasis on the law, and none on the “lore”.
When people have lived in a place for thousands of years, Best said, arrangements evolved over time that fit the society. There is a certain amount of knowledge, he said, which is transmitted generationally, called the lore, which educates people in the ways of their place.
Because the people of Trinidad and Tobago had been brought here a relatively short time ago and had not lived here voluntarily for much of that time, there was no common fund of knowledge - and consistently, throughout the evening, Best returned to UWI’s failure to meet its obligations to the intellectual life of the country by contributing to this fund of knowledge.
Best also implicated other social actors in the miseducation - some people, he said, thought that education would only distract workers from their work.
“The impoverishment of public life is pervasive,” he said. “A lot of people have the impertinence to talk about constitutional reform, but they haven’t defined it. All we have here is confusion, and the Senators are only going to add to it. When we talk about constitutional reform we are talking about reconstituting the state. We are trying to create a state in which we can live as free people.”
This, Best said, was not as simple as it seemed, since, as the nature of power has historically enacted and relied on the lack of representation of the proletarian classes, and people are accustomed to that way of being, which leads them to ethnic structures - created by mutual interest - the most pervasive of which is race.
The first thing to do, in the constitutional reform process, said Best, was to reconstitute the colonial state; and this did not require major changes, but minor ones.
“If we identify the central problem and solve it, we compel the solution of all the consequent problems,” he said. To do this, he said, a distinction needed to be made between symptomatic and substantive arrangements.
