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Thursday, July 10, 2025

Case For Constitutional Reform Part 4

Of­fice of Pres­i­dent should be elim­i­nat­ed

by

20140416

In Part 3, of our se­ries of ar­ti­cles on case for Con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form, pub­lished last week, we high­light­ed the role of Pres­i­dent ANR Robin­son in the 18-18 tied gen­er­al elec­tion.And we ques­tioned his de­ci­sion to by­pass the in­cum­bent Prime Min­is­ter, Bas­deo Pan­day and ap­point PNM Patrick Man­ning as Prime Min­is­ter of T&T. This, de­spite the fact that Pan­day's UNC par­ty col­lect­ed more votes in the elec­tions than Mr Man­ning's Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM).

For­mer Pres­i­dent Arthur Ray­mond Robin­son passed away last week, and in our se­ries we will con­tin­ue to make a case for a new Con­sti­tu­tion that will elim­i­nate the of­fice of the Pres­i­dent of the Re­pub­lic.The ex­ist­ing Con­sti­tu­tion has not worked sat­is­fac­to­ri­ly. His­to­ry has shown that un­der the PNM, there were sig­nif­i­cant clash­es be­tween the gov­ern­ment and the Ju­di­cia­ry, the DPP, the Pub­lic Ser­vice and many oth­er in­sti­tu­tions es­tab­lished un­der the Con­sti­tu­tion.

There must be re­form of our Con­sti­tu­tion to pre­vent fu­ture abuse by any gov­ern­ment and such re­form must re­flect our chang­ing so­cial, po­lit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al cir­cum­stances. As we pro­ceed to treat with the Re­port of De­cem­ber 27, 2013 we wish to in­di­cate at the out­set that there is not the space in these ar­ti­cles to go in­to the pro­pos­als in de­tail and so we sim­ply note a num­ber of gen­er­al points.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers


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