His­tor­i­cal­ly, T&T, joint­ly and sep­a­rate­ly, have been dif­fi­cult is­lands to gov­ern.In 1812, for ex­am­ple, in his cel­e­brat­ed in­junc­tion to Goul­burn, as quot­ed in DJ Mur­ray's The West In­dies and the De­vel­op­ment of Colo­nial Gov­ern­ment 1801-1834, Sir Robert Peel, a UK prime min­is­ter, wrote: "You will im­mor­talise your­self if you will frame a con­sti­tu­tion for Trinidad–it has baf­fled all your pre­de­ces­sors who have uni­form­ly left it as they found it, gov­erned by Span­ish law and pe­ti­tion­ing for Eng­lish. Trinidad is like a sub­ject in an anato­my school or rather a poor pa­tient in a coun­try hos­pi­tal and on whom all sorts of sur­gi­cal ex­per­i­ments are tried, to be giv­en up if they fail and to be prac­tised on oth­ers if they suc­ceed.'

We find al­so, in Dr James Mil­lette's So­ci­ety and Pol­i­tics in Colo­nial Trinidad, the fol­low­ing quote about the state of Trinidad at the be­gin­ning of 1802: "De­prived of a co­her­ent sys­tem of Span­ish law by the con­quest, Trinidad, at the mer­cy of ex­pe­di­en­cy and con­ve­nience, floun­dered from cri­sis to cri­sis. In time the is­land be­came a by­word for capri­cious gov­ern­ment, an ob­ject of un­bound­ed amuse­ment in eru­dite and vul­gar cir­cles alike."

The abo­li­tion of slav­ery in 1834 and the an­nex­a­tion of To­ba­go dur­ing the years 1883-1889 on­ly ex­ac­er­bat­ed the gov­er­nance dif­fi­cul­ties in the ear­ly life of our na­tion.But while, to date, we have sur­vived as func­tion­ing so­ci­eties, at­tain­ing in­de­pen­dence in 1962 and re­pub­li­can sta­tus in 1976, there can be lit­tle doubt that caprice, ex­per­i­ment and floun­der­ing are still the ma­jor build­ing blocks of our gov­er­nance DNA.

So, wel­come to the pres­i­den­cy of the Re­pub­lic of T&T, Your Ex­cel­len­cy An­tho­ny Thomas Aquinas Car­mona. Your job spec­i­fi­ca­tions are clear­ly spec­i­fied in the Con­sti­tu­tion, the sec­tions and claus­es of which must be well known to you.Nev­er­thelsess, the ship of state which you are about to cap­tain has, for the last 20 years or so, been im­mo­bilised and be­calmed in the port of do­mes­tic pol­i­tics. The ship of state must now leave port and ven­ture in­to the open sea of un­chart­ed wa­ters.

I pray that you will sum­mon and live up to the strengths of your giv­en name–Thomas Aquinas, the great philoso­pher, who, it should be not­ed, once said: "If the high­est aim of a cap­tain were to pre­serve his ship, he would keep it in port for­ev­er."

Philip C Nunez