The Ex­press of Feb­ru­ary 3, ran a sto­ry head­lined, PM to meet Row­ley to dis­cuss pres­i­den­tial choice. The sto­ry said, "This meet­ing comes two days af­ter the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment sub­mit­ted to the gov­ern­ment, the name of Jus­tice Rol­ston Nel­son of the Caribbean Court of Jus­tice as its choice for con­sid­er­a­tion."

On the same page At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan claimed that, "PNM didn't con­sult the pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee," but went ahead to an­nounce their can­di­date of choice.He went fur­ther to state, "I have spo­ken per­son­al­ly to Jus­tice Nel­son and he has con­veyed to me his shock and sur­prise over the fact that the PNM has tak­en the lib­er­ty to put for­ward his name as the PNM nom­i­nee to the Of­fice of Pres­i­dent. The learned judge in­di­cat­ed this was done with­out his per­mis­sion, knowl­edge and con­sent."

Chair­man of the UNC and Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, Jack Warn­er, on that same page said, "the pro­ce­dure for elect­ing a pres­i­dent re­mains the same as over the past 50 years and that was the same pro­ce­dure the PNM used in elect­ing past pres­i­dents. So why is it wrong now?"

At the death of Dr Er­ic Williams, first Prime Min­is­ter of T&T in 1981, there were three deputy po­lit­i­cal lead­ers of the PNM. In or­der of se­nior­i­ty they were Ka­malud­din Mo­hammed, Er­rol Ma­habir and George Cham­bers. The first two were of In­di­an de­scent and some peo­ple held the view that the na­tion was not ready for an In­di­an prime min­is­ter.

The most ju­nior of the deputies, George Michael Cham­bers was ap­point­ed by his Ex­cel­len­cy Pres­i­dent Sir El­lis Clarke as the Prime Min­is­ter of T&T. No con­sul­ta­tion or ex­pla­na­tion was ever pro­vid­ed for this choice.

In the gen­er­al elec­tions of 1995, both Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress led by Bas­deo Pan­day and the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment led by Patrick Man­ning were vot­ed the same num­ber of Par­lia­men­tary seats–18 each. Bas­deo Pan­day was the in­cum­bent prime min­is­ter and his po­lit­i­cal par­ty re­ceived a greater num­ber of pop­u­lar votes than the PNM. But Pres­i­dent ANR Robin­son ap­point­ed Patrick Man­ning as the prime min­is­ter.

The rea­son giv­en by Robin­son was his choice was based on "moral and spir­i­tu­al grounds." No where can we find these guid­ing prin­ci­ples in our con­sti­tu­tion and many of us were left to con­sid­er whether eth­nic­i­ty played a role in the re­moval of Bas­deo Pan­day as prime min­is­ter.We wish to now look at our sit­ting pres­i­dent, George Maxwell Richards, and re­fer read­ers to a let­ter writ­ten by Pro­fes­sor David Hor­sham of Brook­lyn, New York and pub­lished in the Ex­press on Jan­u­ary 31.

Pro­fes­sor Hor­sham wrote, "As a pro­fes­sor in the po­lit­i­cal sci­ences de­part­ment of a New York Uni­ver­si­ty with my navel string buried in Trinidad, I of­ten re­view the events of the po­lit­i­cal land­scape of my home­land. Re­cent­ly I con­duct­ed an as­sign­ment in my class to analyse the speech­es of the Pres­i­dent of T&T."

He con­tin­ued, "The speech­es made dur­ing the last ten years by the in­cum­bent pres­i­dent, George Maxwell Richards, were analysed. We de­cid­ed to analyse his speech­es ac­cord­ing to the po­lit­i­cal par­ty in pow­er dur­ing the time pe­ri­od. For the pe­ri­od 2003-2010, or dur­ing the reign of the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment, the themes of His Ex­cel­len­cy's speech­es re­flect a sense of ob­jec­tiv­i­ty.

"Dur­ing the pe­ri­od 2010 to present, how­ev­er, his speech­es are heav­i­ly weight­ed with marked po­lit­i­cal punc­tu­a­tion that con­demns the po­lit­i­cal par­ty cur­rent­ly in of­fice, the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment. Of some of the ex­cerpts from his speech­es, most no­tably and top­i­cal, was the speech he de­liv­ered at the swear­ing in of the new­ly elect­ed THA.

His Ex­cel­len­cy com­ment­ed that, 'The peo­ple of To­ba­go must be care­ful to pre­serve those char­ac­ter­is­tics which de­fine them as a peo­ple and must brook no sub­sti­tutes for them.' There is no one com­ing to the res­cue of Trinidad and To­ba­go."

The Ma­ha Sab­ha now draws at­ten­tion to Pres­i­dent Richards's re­vo­ca­tion of the ap­point­ment of Nizam Mo­hammed as chair­man and mem­ber of the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion. Mo­hammed, in giv­ing ev­i­dence to the joint se­lect com­mit­tee of Par­lia­ment, made men­tion of the racial im­bal­ance in the po­lice ser­vice. For this he was vil­i­fied in the me­dia and we are of the view that the Pres­i­dent, in re­vok­ing the ap­point­ment of Mo­hammed, was re­spond­ing to me­dia and oth­er crit­ics.

But Mo­hammed was on­ly guilty of speak­ing the truth. Patrick Man­ning, then Prime Min­is­ter, ap­point­ed two pro­fes­sors from the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies to con­duct re­search in­to "Eth­nic­i­ty and Em­ploy­ment Prac­tices."

Pro­fes­sor Sel­wyn Ryan and Dr John La Guerre found that in the po­lice ser­vice: "All things be­ing equal, and giv­en the fact that In­do Trinida­di­an can­di­dates are gen­er­al­ly bet­ter qual­i­fied (aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly), it should fol­low that the num­bers of In­do Trinida­di­ans se­lect­ed for train­ing should be high­er. It seems that they tend to do less well in the in­ter­view than do their Afro Trinida­di­ans coun­ter­parts. For the past sev­er­al years, the mem­bers of the in­ter­view­ing pan­el have all been Afro Trinida­di­ans."

Note: Af­ter writ­ing and be­fore pub­li­ca­tion of this ar­ti­cle Prime Min­is­ter Per­sad Bisses­sar an­nounced that Jus­tice An­tho­ny Car­mona is the gov­ern­ment's choice for Pres­i­dent.Al­so Tues­day Civ­il Court judge Ju­dith Jones de­clared Richards' 2011 de­ci­sion to re­voke the ap­point­ment of chair­man of the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion, Nizam Mo­hammed, was "null, void and of no ef­fect."

Sat­narayan Ma­haraj

Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al

Sanatan Dhar­ma Ma­ha Sab­haa