Tony Fras­er

It is not on­ly po­lit­i­cal­ly un­so­phis­ti­cat­ed for To­bag­o­ni­ans, what­ev­er their po­lit­i­cal af­fil­i­a­tion, to take the Prime Min­is­ter at her word on "in­ter­nal self-gov­ern­ment" for the is­land; but it is al­so counter to the his­to­ry of this is­sue for any­one, in­clud­ing Ash­worth Jack, to be­lieve that a gov­ern­ment would ex­pe­di­tious­ly meet the de­sire of To­ba­go.

Part of that his­to­ry is the re­al­i­ty that even in the in­stance when To­ba­go-born cham­pi­on of in­ter­nal self-gov­ern­ment ANR Robin­son had the op­por­tu­ni­ty to in­flu­ence the change he had cam­paigned for, his ad­min­is­tra­tion did not amend the THA Act to give To­ba­go the kind of con­trol over its lo­cal af­fairs that has been called for over the last 35 years.

If Jack or any­one else were to say that such ques­tion­ing would be tak­ing po­lit­i­cal cyn­i­cism a step too far, the Prime Min­is­ter her­self pro­vid­ed proof, per­haps un­in­ten­tion­al­ly, when she placed the re­vi­sion of the THA Act in the con­text of na­tion­al con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form.

Talk and some ac­tion about re­form­ing the 1976 re­pub­li­can Con­sti­tu­tion goes back to the 1987 Hy­atali Com­mis­sion. The doc­u­ment pro­duced at the re­quest of the Na­tion­al Al­liance for Re­con­struc­tion gov­ern­ment re­mains on the shelf. Keep­ing com­pa­ny with that draft called "Think­ing Things Over" are oth­er doc­u­ments pro­duced for gov­ern­ments and by pri­vate groups, in­clud­ing one from the In­de­pen­dent sen­a­tors and the Prin­ci­ples of Fair­ness group es­tab­lished by Ken Gor­don and com­pa­ny.

Every po­lit­i­cal par­ty, every gov­ern­ment since then has had con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form as a ma­jor cam­paign promise. To say that the promis­es have not ma­te­ri­alised would be an un­der­state­ment: not one of those par­ties in gov­ern­ment has made any se­ri­ous at­tempt to have a re­form draft come close to the Par­lia­ment.

There­fore, when Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar hitch­es in­ter­nal self-gov­ern­ment to re­form of the na­tion­al con­sti­tu­tion there must be se­ri­ous scep­ti­cism as to when such an ex­er­cise is to take place. Fur­ther, if you add to it the en­trenched dif­fi­cul­ty in achiev­ing con­sen­sus in the na­tion­al Par­lia­ment to get the req­ui­site ma­jor­i­ty to bring fun­da­men­tal re­form to the con­sti­tu­tion, a ten-year time frame would be a con­ser­v­a­tive guess.

But there is need for more than a few ba­sics on what is be­ing hot­ly de­bat­ed: how does the Prime Min­is­ter de­fine what she calls the "in­ter­nal self-gov­ern­ment" she has promised to the peo­ple of To­ba­go? It is cer­tain that al­most every in­di­vid­ual, group and in­sti­tu­tion has a no­tion of what this means and that is like­ly to be con­trary to what the oth­er groups de­sire.

It is there­fore cer­tain that if and when Prime Min­is­ter Per­sad-Bisses­sar comes to agree on draft leg­is­la­tion for in­ter­nal self-gov­ern­ment for To­ba­go there will be fun­da­men­tal dis­agree­ment over her ver­sion of in­ter­nal self-gov­ern­ment. But the con­fu­sion on­ly be­gins there. There is no short­age of doc­u­ments, drafts and pro­pos­als etc with re­gard to this is­sue of giv­ing To­ba­go the kind of con­sti­tu­tion­al re­la­tion­ship with Trinidad that could be ben­e­fi­cial to the "sis­ter isle."

The Seemu­n­gal draft, the drafts of Sir El­lis Clarke and of Karl Hud­son-Phillips, the rec­om­men­da­tions of the Hy­atali Com­mis­sion, the Jus­tice Gaya Per­saud re­port, the cur­rent re­port of the John Prince Com­mit­tee, the Green Pa­per put out by the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and now the work to be done by the com­mit­tee of two To­ba­go at­tor­neys and po­lit­i­cal sci­en­tist Hamid Ghany, as an­nounced by the Prime Min­is­ter.

In­clud­ed in all of the doc­u­ments would be the views of the tech­ni­cal le­gal ex­perts, spe­cial in­ter­est groups and the Prince Re­port is said to con­tain the views of the thou­sands of peo­ple can­vassed in 41 meet­ings in To­ba­go and Trinidad. In ad­di­tion, the ma­jor po­lit­i­cal par­ties in­clud­ing the TOP, PNM, COP were can­vassed. Al­though in­vit­ed, the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress de­clined par­tic­i­pa­tion.

There is al­so the puz­zling be­hav­iour of Mi­nor­i­ty Leader Jack with re­gard to the work of the Prince Com­mit­tee. The record on the es­tab­lish­ment of the com­mit­tee shows that it was Jack that ini­ti­at­ed the set­ting up of the group. He al­so signed an ini­tial draft of the doc­u­ment pro­duced. He seemed to have fall­en out of love with that process, how­ev­er, af­ter the PP, in­clu­sive of the TOP, won the gen­er­al elec­tion in May 2010. There is there­fore need for se­ri­ous ex­pla­na­tion there.

The PP, on be­half of the TOP and its sup­port­ers, kicked off the 2013 elec­tion cam­paign last week­end with an­nounce­ments of projects to come in To­ba­go in­volv­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars. Are these mere­ly elec­toral en­tice­ments? The To­ba­go elec­torate needs to con­tem­plate the re­al­i­ty that the ex­pen­di­ture of bil­lions of dol­lars al­lo­cat­ed by the cen­tral gov­ern­ment has tak­en place over the eight years of the PNM-led cen­tral gov­ern­ment and THA with­out one step to the re­quired in­ter­nal self-gov­ern­ment be­ing tak­en.

The les­son the elec­torate in To­ba­go has to learn from this is that it should not equate ex­pen­di­ture, state­ments of com­mit­ment by prime min­is­ters and the es­tab­lish­ment of com­mit­tees to amend the THA Act with the achieve­ment of greater au­ton­o­my, de­vo­lu­tion of pow­er from the cen­tre and/or in­ter­nal self-gov­ern­ment. I be­lieve the young peo­ple's phrase would be: "Doh get tie up."