Asha Javeed

Con­sul­tant Ed­i­tor In­ves­ti­ga­tions

asha.javeed@guardian.co.tt

Dr Mar­garet Rose went from guard­ing her po­lit­i­cal in­de­pen­dence “fierce­ly” to be­ing the sur­prise se­lec­tion of Op­po­si­tion Leader Pen­ne­lope Beck­les to join her Sen­ate bench.

Rose, an at­tor­ney who has ground­ed her prac­tice on pro­cure­ment, was sworn in last Fri­day.

While the di­vi­sive­ness of pol­i­tics weighed heav­i­ly on her de­ci­sion, she told Guardian Me­dia that for her, “This was not a time for me to be neu­tral.”

“I am en­ter­ing with my eyes open. Pol­i­tics in Trinidad and To­ba­go can be harsh, trib­al and deeply per­son­al. There is a part of me that won­ders whether I am cut out for that en­vi­ron­ment. But I am al­so clear about my pur­pose. My guid­ing prin­ci­ple is coun­try first. I have no in­ter­est in the pol­i­tics of per­son­al de­struc­tion. I want to con­tribute to a more se­ri­ous, more dis­ci­plined and more hope­ful pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion.

“In my le­gal prac­tice, I have rep­re­sent­ed peo­ple with­out fear or favour. That is how I in­tend to serve in the Sen­ate. There are mat­ters on my desk right now, in­clud­ing mat­ters against pub­lic of­fi­cials who act­ed dur­ing the for­mer ad­min­is­tra­tion, that I will con­tin­ue to pur­sue. And this is with the bless­ing of the cur­rent Leader of the Op­po­si­tion, which says some­thing. It says PNM un­der this lead­er­ship is pre­pared to put coun­try first. Had it not been so, I would not have tak­en up the ap­point­ment. I will sup­port what I be­lieve is right. I will ques­tion what I be­lieve re­quires scruti­ny. And I will try to do so with dig­ni­ty. Pol­i­tics does not have to make us small­er. At its best, it should help us imag­ine a bet­ter coun­try and then do the hard work of build­ing it,” she said.

She ad­mit­ted that she’s had po­lit­i­cal am­bi­tions since she was a child, hav­ing been brought up in a “PNM fam­i­ly.”

“And I would say back then I was a naïve mem­ber of the par­ty and saw every­thing through those lens,” she said.

Pas­sion­ate about pro­cure­ment

She re­called her ap­point­ment as coun­sel to the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry in­to Pi­ar­co, just about eight years in prac­tice and be­ing just ap­palled at the way the then gov­ern­ment made de­ci­sions over our pub­lic mon­ey.

“So an­ti-cor­rup­tion be­came my thing. I be­gan re­search­ing and go­ing deep­er to un­der­stand how does one erad­i­cate this scourge of cor­rup­tion that seemed to plague re­source rich coun­tries in the glob­al south across Africa and the Caribbean. The deep­er I got in­to my work, I start­ed to un­der­stand that there were deep­er struc­tur­al is­sues at play. And so I be­came pas­sion­ate about pub­lic pro­cure­ment. Through Pi­ar­co, I be­gan to see that pub­lic pro­cure­ment was the lever­age point in a pub­lic gov­er­nance sys­tem- if we got that right, there would be a domi­no ef­fect across all pol­i­cy are­nas. Be­cause pro­cure­ment is the bridge be­tween what a gov­ern­ment says it is go­ing to do and what it ac­tu­al­ly does. I saw the amount of pow­er po­lit­i­cal de­ci­sion mak­ers had vis-à-vis the cit­i­zen and as I de­vel­oped in my prac­tice and launched the Caribbean Pro­cure­ment In­sti­tute in 2006, I no longer had that naïve PNM per­spec­tive,” she ex­plained.

For the fol­low­ing 20 years of her prac­tice, Rose fo­cused on im­prov­ing pub­lic gov­er­nance and found­ed a civic or­gan­i­sa­tion, Dis­clo­sure To­day.

“I was pas­sion­ate about cit­i­zens do­ing more, about cre­at­ing more op­por­tu­ni­ties for par­tic­i­pa­to­ry gov­er­nance. And dur­ing this pe­ri­od, I guard­ed my po­lit­i­cal in­de­pen­dence fierce­ly. I felt I could do more good on the out­side of it. I lived through the pas­sage of the pro­cure­ment leg­is­la­tion in 2015, which was one of the most pro­gres­sive pro­cure­ment laws world­wide. I was part of a civ­il so­ci­ety ef­fort that was very crit­i­cal of pol­i­cy by im­port and we sought to ad­vo­cate for a pro­cure­ment law that pro­mot­ed lo­cal in­dus­try de­vel­op­ment and sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment,” she ex­plained.

Her doc­tor­al re­search ex­am­ined the geopo­lit­i­cal his­to­ry of pro­cure­ment law and demon­strat­ed how tra­di­tion­al pro­cure­ment law and ap­proach­es were hi­jacked by a ne­olib­er­al agen­da.

She ob­served that in 2023, the pro­cure­ment law was ful­ly pro­mul­gat­ed and while the PNM gov­ern­ment has to be com­mend­ed for mak­ing that hap­pen, it was a re­sult of a joint ef­fort by both sides of the po­lit­i­cal di­vide – the UNC passed it in­to law in 2015.

A dif­fer­ent an­gle

Rose ob­served that now de­ci­sion mak­ers with­in both ad­min­is­tra­tions are chal­lenged and there is an “ur­gency.”

“I have been try­ing to write con­sis­tent­ly to raise some of the is­sues but I think the time has come for me do more and try to make a con­tri­bu­tion from a dif­fer­ent an­gle. I have done it in the courts, through my teach­ing, my re­search and writ­ing… now I want to see how I might do it through in­flu­enc­ing how laws are made.

“We are in a mo­ment in his­to­ry, not just lo­cal­ly but glob­al­ly, where there ap­pears to be a cri­sis in po­lit­i­cal lead­er­ship and as a cit­i­zen, we have a sense of not hav­ing hope for our chil­dren’s fu­ture, that those we have elect­ed to serve have the peo­ple’s in­ter­est, the pub­lic in­ter­est first. I must con­fess that it is what ap­pears to be the fla­grant dis­re­gard of the pro­cure­ment leg­is­la­tion by the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion ($3.4B HDC scan­dal, Land­mark, and oth­er dis­clo­sures),” she said.

“Hon­est­ly, I am not a politi­cian. I have nev­er seen my­self as such. I am an ad­vo­cate. I am a teacher. And I am what I hope is a “right-think­ing” cit­i­zen who wants to see the sys­tems serve the peo­ple bet­ter. And in a mo­ment such as this, if I am asked to step up and con­tribute be­cause of my skills in pub­lic pro­cure­ment, how do I say no? Maybe what we need now are peo­ple with lit­tle po­lit­i­cal am­bi­tion but a strong de­sire to see the coun­try pros­per for all and the abil­i­ty and will­ing­ness to serve. There are prob­lems with the leg­is­la­tion and the cur­rent in­fra­struc­ture. There are prob­lems with the ca­pac­i­ty of pro­fes­sion­als im­ple­ment­ing the leg­is­la­tion, both with­in the pub­lic bod­ies and in the OPR it­self. And this ad­min­is­tra­tion seems to have se­ri­ous prob­lems with com­pli­ance. So I want to see if I can have a greater im­pact on these is­sues from the Sen­ate,” she said.

She not­ed that the PNM suf­fered a se­ri­ous elec­toral de­feat, which was a mes­sage from the peo­ple.

“Any se­ri­ous po­lit­i­cal in­sti­tu­tion must lis­ten care­ful­ly when cit­i­zens speak in that way. I be­lieve the PNM now has to do the hard work of re­pair and re­new­al.

“I ac­cept­ed this ap­point­ment be­cause I be­lieve I can con­tribute to that process. I al­so be­lieve the Op­po­si­tion Leader’s call for re­new­al is im­por­tant. Her calm, de­lib­er­ate and in­clu­sive lead­er­ship style can help cre­ate space for se­ri­ous re­build­ing.”