There are three of­fice hold­ers in T&T who are en­ti­tled to a tax-free pen­sion for life, equal to their full salary, and with­out any length of ser­vice re­quire­ment. These are the Pres­i­dent of the Re­pub­lic, the Prime Min­is­ter, and the Chief Jus­tice, who need on­ly to serve in of­fice for a sin­gle day to earn this pen­sion.

The Pres­i­dent should en­joy the re­spect of all cit­i­zens and be seen to be above pol­i­tics; he must act on be­half of all cit­i­zens and not in the in­ter­est of any sec­tion­al group. While the pres­i­dent's term of of­fice is five years, a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date meet­ing these cri­te­ria will hope­ful­ly serve sev­er­al terms over­lap­ping any change of gov­ern­ments.

If a Pres­i­dent is not uni­ver­sal­ly ac­cept­ed, but is seen mere­ly as the pick of the par­ty in pow­er, T&T can have a new Pres­i­dent every five years co­in­cid­ing with changes of ad­min­is­tra­tions; this cer­tain­ly will be a na­tion­al tragedy. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, an un­con­scionable po­lit­i­cal par­ty could ro­tate the pres­i­den­cy to al­low un­suit­able can­di­dates to earn life­time pen­sions.

I do not sub­scribe to Mr Lal­la's view that the peo­ple should chose the Pres­i­dent. In a pop­u­lar­i­ty con­test, T&T might well find it­self with a Pres­i­dent with foot­ball qual­i­fi­ca­tions but who is not com­pe­tent to per­form the du­ties of pres­i­dent, or even of a min­is­ter of na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty. Un­til a bet­ter sys­tem than the present one emerges, I con­tin­ue to hope that good judg­ment will pre­vail in se­lect­ing a Pres­i­dent ac­cept­able to the vast ma­jor­i­ty of cit­i­zens.

Michael J Williams

Mara­cas Val­ley