The ab­solute tri­umph by the in­cum­bent To­ba­go Peo­ple’s Par­ty (TPP) over the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) blasts open the road to a “To­ba­go Is­land Gov­ern­ment,” which was at the core of the cam­paign of the TPP. The chal­lenge now is for Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine and his team to achieve the con­sti­tu­tion­al change.

Noth­ing short of the re­place­ment of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) with a To­ba­go Is­land Gov­ern­ment and leg­is­la­ture with law-mak­ing pow­ers is the stat­ed ob­jec­tive of the TPP. The in­sis­tence on fun­da­men­tal con­sti­tu­tion­al change was start­ed 45 years ago by then MPs for To­ba­go East and West, ANR Robin­son and Dr Win­ston Mur­ray. The change agen­da was tak­en to in­creased lev­els by Mr Robin­son as chair­man of the As­sem­bly and sub­se­quent chair­men, Dr Jeff David­son and Ho­choy Charles.

Over the decades, changes have been made to the THA Act in the na­tion­al Con­sti­tu­tion to fa­cil­i­tate the on­go­ing quest for greater au­ton­o­my for To­ba­go. One of the changes cam­paigned for in the run-up to the 2026 THA elec­tion in­cludes the cre­ation of a To­ba­go Is­land Gov­ern­ment Act in a To­ba­go leg­is­la­ture by 2027.

An­oth­er of the crit­i­cal el­e­ments of the self-gov­ern­ment changes stat­ed by the TPP in its man­i­festo is for a Pe­tro­le­um Re­sources Ac­cord, which seeks to re­tain 50 per cent of rev­enues from the oil and gas ex­tract­ed with­in To­ba­go’s Ex­clu­sive Eco­nom­ic Zone.

The over­all ques­tion now—with the na­tion­al gov­ern­ment in Port-of-Spain, the Par­lia­ment, in­clu­sive of the Op­po­si­tion and the In­de­pen­dent sen­a­tors who con­sti­tute the law-mak­ing body—is whether they are dis­posed to ne­go­ti­at­ing and reach­ing agree­ment on the changes as cam­paigned for and agreed to by the To­ba­go elec­torate.

As To­ba­go has found out over the decades re­gard­ing its push for ma­jor con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ments to the THA Act, po­lit­i­cal rhetoric dif­fers sig­nif­i­cant­ly from the task of de­bat­ing and agree­ing in the Par­lia­ment to have the re­quire­ments for the changes passed in­to law.

As stat­ed above, the right to 50 per cent of the oil/gas rev­enue de­rived from the re­sources in To­ba­go wa­ters will in­evitably at­tract a sig­nif­i­cant amount of at­ten­tion. Will that de­mand be in ad­di­tion to the por­tion of the na­tion­al bud­get al­lo­cat­ed to To­ba­go in the Par­lia­ment?

Then there are the pure­ly po­lit­i­cal is­sues, which will sure­ly be con­sid­er­a­tions for the rul­ing par­ty and the Op­po­si­tion in Trinidad. Al­though not com­plete­ly de­pen­dent on the two To­ba­go par­lia­men­tary seats to sur­vive and func­tion ef­fec­tive­ly, the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress and its coali­tion part­ners in labour will have to con­sid­er the like­ly po­lit­i­cal fall­out if the TPP is de­nied its de­mands.

Sim­i­lar­ly, the pos­si­ble po­lit­i­cal re­spons­es in Trinidad to the de­mands of the THA, more­over the As­sem­bly be­ing com­plete­ly con­trolled by the TPP, can­not be pre­dict­ed.

The fu­ture con­sti­tu­tion­al trans­for­ma­tion in sup­port of To­ba­go’s de­sire for greater au­ton­o­my is, there­fore, a com­pli­cat­ed one with no sure line to suc­cess, un­less there is buy-in from all stake­hold­ers.