Having been served with over 10,000 copies of the Ramadhar Constitution Commission Report "for free", it may be expected that a reasonable reaction would be forthcoming from the citizenry to its contents since it was presented in December last. It does appear, however, that this public reaction has not been forthcoming, leading one to conclude that the general public perhaps does not place the issue of reform of the Constitution among the matters to be accorded priority status in the governance of this country at this time.
In any event, in my view, and perhaps of even greater significance, is the fact that the much heralded consultations mounted by the Commission, judging by numbers in attendance, did not appear to demonstrate the enthusiasm which, it is suggested, should be the basis for the fundamental changes being advocated in the Commission's recommendations. Having reviewed the report, this writer makes the following brief comments on some of what he considers to be the core recommendations:
1. While the report recommends a complete re-engineering of the Senate as presently constituted, with the appointment of Ministers being made from that body only, no mention has been made of the mechanism to bring about so-called "equality of power" between the Senate and the House of Representatives with which it will share equality in membership;
2. Since Ministers would be appointed from the Senate only, the Executive (the Cabinet) would be located therein and, recalling that the members of the Senate would be "selected" from lists which would have been forwarded to the Elections and Boundaries Commission at the time of a General Election, one may be entitled to enquire of the criteria for determining total membership;
3. Also, with Ministers being appointed from the Senate only, this body would be all-powerful;
4. While Senators are to be "selected" based on a proportion of the total votes received by parties in the general election, members of the House of Representatives are to be elected directly on a constituency basis by first-past-the post system. This appears to be the Hare PR Method which was used in the recent local government elections with results which, one feels, the PP would wish to forget. It should be noted that justification for employing one method as opposed to another is not properly spelt out;
5. It is envisaged that Members of the House of Representatives would be full-time and would be provided with a Constituency Development Fund (so-called) to enable them to disburse resources to address projects purportedly needing attention in their constituencies. What and who will determine constituency needs? Needless to say, this would be fraught with danger being in the first place, impossible to administer fairly and secondly, being very well a hornet's nest, opening the way for possible corruption, favouritism, unaccountability and competition with local government councillors;
6. It seems that, in effect, the House of Representatives would be a talk shop, notwithstanding the recommendation that its members would serve on Parliamentary Committees and being watchdogs over the Senate;
7. A Tobagonian having been appointed to the Commission, the reasons proffered for not treating at all with the matter of the constitutional status of Tobago, are clearly unacceptable;
8. Notwithstanding preceding comments, this writer has nevertheless found that the following are worthy of acceptance and immediate implementation:
(a) action to make the judiciary financially independent;
(b) action to make the Office of the DPP independent;
(c) the long-standing realisation that "value for money" auditing by the Auditor General should take effect.
Errol O C Cupid,
Trincity