Yvonne Ba­boolal

Bas­deo Pan­day, for­mer prime min­is­ter and UNC leader, is be­ing dis­mis­sive of the present con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form process and propos­ing an en­tire­ly new one, to­geth­er with a new style of gov­er­nance in which an ex­ec­u­tive pres­i­dent is elect­ed by the peo­ple and runs the gov­ern­ment.He is al­so ad­vo­cat­ing a uni­cam­er­al Par­lia­ment whose mem­bers would be elect­ed by the process of pro­por­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion.

Mak­ing his con­tri­bu­tion to the on­go­ing con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form con­sul­ta­tions in a state­ment to the me­dia, Pan­day said the process now be­ing used would be a colos­sal waste of time and mon­ey if the or­di­nary peo­ple were not heard for more than the usu­al three min­utes.He said all pre­vi­ous ef­forts at con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form have failed be­cause the process had left out the voice of the or­di­nary peo­ple, and need­ed to be rad­i­cal­ly al­tered.

"This process con­sti­tut­ed gen­er­al­ly of nom­i­nat­ing a team of le­gal minds to sit around a round, square or ob­long ta­ble with a man­date to for­mu­late a 'Draft Con­sti­tu­tion,' which would then be put be­fore 'the peo­ple' for com­ment."But the framers of the Con­sti­tu­tion, he said, must un­der­stand the hopes, fears and as­pi­ra­tions of or­di­nary peo­ple, and this could not be achieved by the present ex­er­cise head­ed by Le­gal Af­fairs Min­is­ter Prakash Ra­mad­har.

"Noth­ing could be more elit­ist than this ap­proach. Sure­ly, such a draft doc­u­ment, more of­ten than not, writ­ten in legalese, would most like­ly be com­ment­ed up­on (even though not nec­es­sar­i­ly un­der­stood) by aca­d­e­mics, arm­chair politi­cians, news­pa­per com­men­ta­tors and cranks."Such a draft would mean noth­ing to the farm­ers, the work­ers, the taxi-dri­vers, the or­di­nary peo­ple (who, in­ci­den­tal­ly, con­sti­tute the ma­jor­i­ty). Their voic­es are nev­er heard be­cause of the faulty process."

De­scrib­ing what he be­lieved the new Con­sti­tu­tion should look like, Pan­day said: "The pres­i­dent should be elect­ed by the peo­ple on the ba­sis of one-man, one-vote."Hav­ing been so elect­ed, the pres­i­dent should be em­pow­ered to se­lect his cab­i­net from (in his view) the most ca­pa­ble per­sons in the coun­try who are not mem­bers of the leg­is­la­ture."Hav­ing se­lect­ed his Cab­i­net the Pres­i­dent is then both the Head of State and the head of gov­ern­ment."

Pan­day said at the be­gin­ning of each year the pres­i­dent should ad­dress the na­tion in­form­ing the peo­ple of his/her pro­gramme for the en­su­ing year."This must then go to the Par­lia­ment for fund­ing of the pro­gramme.Pan­day sug­gest­ed a whole new way of elect­ing peo­ple in­to gov­ern­ment.He said the Par­lia­ment to which the pres­i­dent must go for fund­ing is to be quite dif­fer­ent from the present one.

"It is a uni­cam­er­al Par­lia­ment, that is, con­sist­ing one House of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 100 mem­bers elect­ed on the ba­sis of pro­por­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion."The ba­sis for the pro­pos­al for pro­por­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion is that it would al­low for greater par­tic­i­pa­tion of a wider cross-sec­tion of the peo­ple in the de­ci­sion-mak­ing process.

"The present sys­tem of first-past-the post-sin­gle-mem­ber-con­stituen­cy not on­ly ef­fec­tive­ly dis­en­fran­chis­es sev­er­al thou­sands of the elec­torate but his­tor­i­cal­ly has en­cour­aged racial and eth­nic vot­ing."Pro­por­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion would en­cour­age the for­ma­tion of groups with com­mon eco­nom­ic and so­cial in­ter­ests as op­posed to racial and eth­nic af­fil­i­a­tions that have plagued this coun­try for decades," he said.He claimed the PNM and the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment do not want pro­por­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion.

The late Dr Er­ic Williams saw pro­por­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion as "a dag­ger aimed at the heart of the PNM," he re­called, while he felt the present PM's speech at the launch of con­sul­ta­tions on con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form last month "clear­ly in­di­cat­ed she is think­ing of 'con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ments' and not "con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form.

"There is a great dif­fer­ence be­tween the two. It would seem nei­ther par­ty wants con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form be­cause the present Con­sti­tu­tion with its propen­si­ty for di­vi­sive­ness at elec­tion time suits them per­fect­ly," Pan­day con­clud­ed.

The full text of Bas­deo Pan­day's pro­pos­al will be pub­lished in the T&T Guardian, start­ing to­mor­row.