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Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Missing the point of the march

by

20121103

If there was any­thing more glar­ing­ly ev­i­dent than the dra­mat­ic show of dis­sat­is­fac­tion that Fri­day's march through the city of­fered, it was the Gov­ern­ment's ap­par­ent in­abil­i­ty to un­der­stand the protest and to for­mu­late a sen­si­ble, let alone sat­is­fac­to­ry re­sponse to it.

The march was var­i­ous­ly de­scribed as a protest against the Sec­tion 34 de­ba­cle, the con­tin­ued pres­ence of At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan and Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Jack Warn­er in of­fice and an ex­pres­sion of con­cern about the qual­i­ty of gov­er­nance of­fered by the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship.

The crowd, es­ti­mat­ed by po­lice of­fi­cers on the scene to have be­gun at around 1,000 as they gath­ered at Wood­ford Square, was said to have swelled to more than 20,000 along the route be­fore set­tling at 7,000 for the speech­es on the Bri­an Lara Prom­e­nade that end­ed the gath­er­ing.

The protest at­tract­ed a range of po­lit­i­cal, NGO and civ­il so­ci­ety lead­ers, among them the Op­po­si­tion Leader, Kei­th Row­ley, the THA's Orville Lon­don, David Ab­du­lah of the MSJ, Kirk Meighoo of the DNA, ac­tivist Wayne Kubals­ingh, sev­er­al trade unions march­ing as the Joint Trade Union Move­ment, Fix­in' T&T's Kirk Wait­he, for­mer at­tor­ney gen­er­al Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj and, ap­par­ent­ly, Iw­er George.

Just hours be­fore the pro­test­ers con­vened, eight ap­pli­cants who had sought to have their cas­es dis­missed dur­ing the brief win­dow that Sec­tion 34 was legal­ly in force ap­peared be­fore Mag­is­trate Ejen­ny Es­pinet to seek a hold on le­gal pro­ceed­ings un­til their Sec­tion 34 ap­pli­ca­tions were heard by the High Court.

Among the eight were Ish­war Gal­barans­ingh and Steve Fer­gu­son. In the face of the crowd's of­ten scur­rilous anger and the fu­ri­ous speech­es of­fered, the Gov­ern­ment of­fered Mr Ram­lo­gan and Mr Warn­er to the me­dia to re­but the con­cerns raised.

The At­tor­ney Gen­er­al chose to tip­toe around the is­sue, falling back on the Gov­ern­ment's de­fault po­si­tion, not­ing that Gov­ern­ment re­spect­ed, "the fun­da­men­tal rights and free­doms of the press and free­dom of ex­pres­sion." Mr Ram­lo­gan could find no irony in ut­ter­ing these words, which sug­gest that the Gov­ern­ment's re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to up­hold the Con­sti­tu­tion, and the rights en­shrined in it, are ex­cep­tion­al.

Mr Warn­er took a far dif­fer­ent ap­proach in his as­sess­ment of the protest march. He chal­lenged the num­bers, the eth­nic com­po­si­tion of the marchers and dis­missed the crowd as "old PNM stal­warts." This put Mr Warn­er in the po­si­tion of be­ing out­spo­ken by Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj who said, "It is not a UNC is­sue, it is not a PNM is­sue, it is not a COP is­sue, it is a peo­ple is­sue. This is not an In­di­an is­sue, an African is­sue or a Chi­nese is­sue, this is (a) Trinidad and To­ba­go is­sue."

Row­ley warned that the peo­ple would have their say, whether it would come in the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly elec­tion, the lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tion or the gen­er­al elec­tion, the trust he saw as bro­ken would have a price. Un­til those elec­tions, the Gov­ern­ment must ac­knowl­edge that a por­tion of the elec­torate has grown dis­en­chant­ed with its ap­proach to gov­er­nance and the lim­it­ed re­sponse to mat­ters of pub­lic con­cern.

There was lit­tle sign af­ter Fri­day's march that the Gov­ern­ment's lead­er­ship had come to terms with the rep­re­sen­ta­tive pow­er of the marchers, choos­ing in­stead to di­min­ish the scale and scope of the protest by chal­leng­ing head counts in­stead of en­gag­ing the re­al­i­ty of the dis­sat­is­fac­tion they rep­re­sent. It was at this crit­i­cal point three years ago that the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion made the fa­tal er­ror of dis­miss­ing pub­lic protests as pol­i­tics and not civ­il con­cern.

Was there pol­i­tics in play on Fri­day? It would be naive not to ac­knowl­edge that. But the Gov­ern­ment would be well ad­vised to ac­knowl­edge the scale of un­hap­pi­ness with their ad­min­is­tra­tion that Fri­day's protest in­di­cates, and to im­prove their com­mit­ment to the trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty they promised on the cam­paign trail.


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