Last Sun­day, the book “Man­ning: Faith and Vi­sion”, writ­ten by Prof Brid­get Br­ere­ton, was launched at NA­PA in PoS. It was an oc­ca­sion where many peo­ple in pub­lic life, past and present, gath­ered to re­mem­ber a man who re­vived the PNM from the ash­es of its first-ever gen­er­al elec­tion de­feat in 1986.

He was sworn in­to the of­fice of Prime Min­is­ter four times and won his seat in San Fer­nan­do East 11 times. That in it­self is a record. He ad­vised pres­i­dents Noor Has­sanali (1995) and George Maxwell Richards (2010) to dis­solve Par­lia­ment well be­fore its due date and on both oc­ca­sions his gam­ble did not pay off and the PNM end­ed up in op­po­si­tion.

He was chal­lenged for the lead­er­ship of the par­ty in 1996, and he staved off a chal­lenge from Dr Kei­th Row­ley, how­ev­er, in 2010, af­ter the sec­ond de­feat, he re­signed as po­lit­i­cal leader and Dr Row­ley suc­ceed­ed him.

At the book launch, Man­ning’s long-time friend from their uni­ver­si­ty days at the UWI Mona Cam­pus in Ja­maica, St Vin­cent and the Grenadines Prime Min­is­ter Dr Ralph Gon­za­les, spoke about the de­ci­sion to call the ear­ly 2010 gen­er­al elec­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to a Guardian Me­dia re­port by Ira Math­ur about the book launch on June 11, Gon­za­les said, “Patrick called the 2010 elec­tions amidst grow­ing un­truths and lies. See­ing him­self as a ser­vant of the peo­ple, com­mit­ted to their wel­fare, he trust­ed the peo­ple would see through false­hoods, claims of his au­to­crat­ic ten­den­cies, but the peo­ple failed him and went for an op­por­tunis­tic part­ner­ship based on quick­sand.”

Dr Gon­za­les care­ful­ly nav­i­gat­ed his ad­dress on this point through a very tu­mul­tuous pe­ri­od in PNM po­lit­i­cal his­to­ry. He was able to fo­cus his dis­course on a “ma­nia” that gripped the land and the ar­rival of a “war­rior queen.” This gave him cov­er to avoid speak­ing about what was go­ing on in­side the PNM when Dr Row­ley, hav­ing been named as the can­di­date for Diego Mar­tin West, waged his own per­son­al cam­paign in­side of the of­fi­cial PNM cam­paign with his calls for “court mar­tials” and that he was a “sailor” on the open seas.

Of course, it would have been im­politic for Dr Gon­za­les to have ven­tured in­to this area at the book launch, but the dis­course about the 2010 gen­er­al elec­tion evoked mem­o­ries, for those who re­mem­ber it, of the ten­sions in­side the PNM which led to its demise on May 24, 2010. The mat­ter of his res­ig­na­tion as po­lit­i­cal leader of the PNM was ad­dressed by the PNM Gen­er­al Coun­cil right af­ter the elec­tion.

In the book, Br­ere­ton de­scribes that meet­ing in the fol­low­ing way: “The coun­cil meet­ing on 27 May wit­nessed ex­tra­or­di­nary scenes. Many sup­port­ers turned up in the Bal­isi­er House grounds and car park while the meet­ing pro­ceed­ed up­stairs. Man­ning read his res­ig­na­tion let­ter aloud, which stat­ed, ‘I here­by re­sign’ as leader but pro­posed that he would stay on un­til the new one had been elect­ed, at which time ‘it would be my plea­sure to grace­ful­ly demit of­fice.’” (p 362).

Br­ere­ton con­tin­ues to de­scribe what tran­spired at that meet­ing as fol­lows: “Mean­while, up­stairs, the coun­cil con­tin­ued. Orville Lon­don pro­posed that the 12 PNM MPs should tell the pres­i­dent that they sup­port­ed Row­ley as op­po­si­tion leader, and this was agreed to.” (p 363).

And so the lead­er­ship of the PNM by Patrick Man­ning came to an end. His bold­est po­lit­i­cal move as prime min­is­ter was to seek to re­form the Con­sti­tu­tion to in­tro­duce an ex­ec­u­tive pres­i­den­cy which would have been weak­er than the cur­rent of­fice of prime min­is­ter in our par­lia­men­tary sys­tem be­cause of the hy­bridi­s­a­tion of the pres­i­den­tial and par­lia­men­tary sys­tems.

There were far more checks and bal­ances in his ver­sion of the ex­ec­u­tive pres­i­den­cy when com­pared to the prime min­is­te­r­i­al pow­ers of our cur­rent Con­sti­tu­tion. Those op­posed to the idea leaned on the Latin Amer­i­can caudil­lo im­age for their re­sis­tance in­stead of em­brac­ing the Wash­ing­ton mod­el which was more akin to what was be­ing pro­posed with an el­e­ment of par­lia­men­tarism be­ing re­tained.

He was go­ing against our West­min­ster-White­hall DNA of the “British Con­sti­tu­tion suit­ably mod­i­fied” as pro­claimed by Er­ic Williams in 1955 while he was still a pri­vate cit­i­zen.

As the coun­try con­tin­ues to seek con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form along­side com­plaints of too much unchecked prime min­is­te­r­i­al pow­er, the re­al­i­sa­tion that Man­ning was ahead of his time on this re­form will even­tu­al­ly set in.

Prof Hamid Ghany is a Pro­fes­sor of Con­sti­tu­tion­al Af­fairs and Par­lia­men­tary Stud­ies at The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI). He was al­so ap­point­ed an Hon­orary Pro­fes­sor of The UWI up­on his re­tire­ment in Oc­to­ber 2021. He con­tin­ues his re­search and pub­li­ca­tions and al­so does some teach­ing at The UWI.