Tony Rakhal Fras­er

At the core of what I have been teas­ing out over the last four columns is the re­al­i­ty that dur­ing the pe­ri­od of in­de­pen­dence, our ma­jor po­lit­i­cal par­ties in and out of gov­ern­ment and op­po­si­tion have not been able to call in­to ex­is­tence the as­pi­ra­tions for mean­ing­ful and sus­tain­able na­tion­hood.

The fail­ures have been most dis­cernible and pun­ish­ing to large groups of cit­i­zens dur­ing the oc­ca­sions when en­er­gy prices were soft on the world mar­ket. That phe­nom­e­non ex­posed our in­ca­pac­i­ty to have at least be­gun the es­tab­lish­ment of a vi­able and sus­tain­able econ­o­my to light­en the bur­den on the en­er­gy sec­tor. Those were in­stances when so­cial de­cay set in and deep­ened as the State, the busi­ness and in­dus­tri­al sec­tors al­lowed op­por­tu­ni­ties to pass by with­out them be­ing able to utilise the rev­enue from high en­er­gy prices to de­vel­op oth­er eco­nom­ic poles. In­deed, there were oc­ca­sions dur­ing those times of grace to en­cour­age so­cial bond­ing in a plur­al so­ci­ety made up of peo­ple of di­verse eth­nic and na­tion­al­ist back­grounds.

To be clear, I am not ad­vo­cat­ing that the var­i­ous group­ings, tribes, and eth­nic­i­ties bury their an­ces­tral her­itages and cul­tures and morph in­to an un­like­ly whole, shorn of in­di­vid­ual iden­ti­ty and form. Rather, I am in­sist­ing that we could have used the op­por­tu­ni­ty when sur­vival was not an is­sue for most to have grown as a ma­tur­ing peo­ple fo­cused on build­ing on the strengths of the in­di­vid­ual groups, tribes and eth­nic­i­ties.

In­stead of com­ing to­geth­er as a na­tion of many peo­ples, co­he­sive and con­scious of the need to con­struct a vi­able and sus­tain­able na­tion out of the many, we al­lowed the po­lit­i­cal par­ty cul­ture, which be­gan gath­er­ing in the 1930s and in­ten­si­fy­ing in the decades in the run-up to po­lit­i­cal in­de­pen­dence and there­after, to sep­a­rate us in­to “frag­ments of a peo­ple”, to para­phrase LeRoy Clarke.

On the oc­ca­sions of the three to four at­tempts at po­lit­i­cal co­he­sion in the best in­ter­est of gov­er­nance of all of the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go, the em­pha­sis was on in­di­vid­ual groups with­in the coali­tions hold­ing the raw pow­er over the oth­ers.

Less than two months ago, cit­i­zen cyn­i­cism about the in­ten­tion and abil­i­ty of po­lit­i­cal par­ties to be able to find the so­lu­tions to the prob­lems re­sult­ed in 46 per cent of the elec­torate stay­ing away from the polls.

The fail­ures over time to pro­duce this co­he­sive and for­ward-look­ing so­ci­ety have been man­i­fest; notwith­stand­ing the fact that more than most coun­tries in the Eng­lish-speak­ing West In­dies, T&T has had the good for­tune of hav­ing huge wind­falls of rev­enue from the en­er­gy in­dus­try when in­ter­na­tion­al prices for oil, gas and petro­chem­i­cals peaked at sev­er­al points over the post-in­de­pen­dence pe­ri­od.

It’s cer­tain that mon­ey alone can­not cre­ate the kind of na­tion­hood that the in­de­pen­dence gen­er­a­tion en­vis­aged, but hav­ing the phys­i­cal means to plan for, sup­port and cre­ate the ba­sis up­on which a sus­tain­able plat­form could have been con­struct­ed was al­lowed to slip by. What that fail­ure made clear is the need for a far wider ap­pre­ci­a­tion of the kind of po­lit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic and hu­man plat­form up­on which a durable and sus­tain­able so­ci­ety can be con­struct­ed.

But far from as­crib­ing the fail­ures ex­clu­sive­ly to pol­i­tics, po­lit­i­cal par­ties and gov­er­nance, we as a peo­ple in our col­lec­tives and in­di­vid­ual selves have not yearned af­ter and been pre­pared to take on the na­tion­al­ist task of qual­i­ty self-gov­er­nance.

The in­sti­tu­tions we have cre­at­ed dur­ing the pe­ri­od of po­lit­i­cal in­de­pen­dence have al­so not been able to cre­ate the strength in qual­i­ty and pur­pose which is need­ed for the emer­gence of a peo­ple wor­thy of na­tion­hood.

At the lev­el of the econ­o­my, the cul­ture of mer­chan­dis­ing for the in­dus­tri­al and com­mer­cial pro­duc­ers in the metro­pole has con­tin­ued and in­deed ex­pand­ed to in­clude mass con­sump­tion of goods and ser­vices from abroad. We have spent large quan­ti­ties of the for­eign ex­change earned al­most ex­clu­sive­ly by the en­er­gy sec­tor on for­eign con­sump­tion with the ac­com­pa­ny­ing fail­ure to cre­ate and deep­en lo­cal pro­duc­tion.

In the last of the pre­vi­ous columns, I ad­vo­cat­ed, not for the first time, that one el­e­ment of the so­lu­tion to the prob­lems list­ed above is to sep­a­rate par­ty pol­i­tics and con­stituen­cy rep­re­sen­ta­tion from form­ing a gov­ern­ment. Elect an ex­ec­u­tive pres­i­dent free of par­ty af­fil­i­a­tion who will se­lect and be re­spon­si­ble for the func­tion­ing of a cab­i­net of ex­perts to meet the needs of achiev­ing qual­i­ty gov­er­nance.

I have ar­gued that we have to­tal­ly mixed up the re­quire­ment and abil­i­ty of politi­cians to mo­bilise a con­stituen­cy of vot­ers to elect a po­lit­i­cal par­ty with the need for ex­perts to dis­cern, plan for, de­vel­op and im­ple­ment strate­gies and pro­grammes to achieve the ob­jec­tives of po­lit­i­cal in­de­pen­dence.

What are the op­tions? A na­tion­al ap­proach to the re­search­ing of our fail­ures: think, de­lib­er­ate, cre­ate pos­si­bil­i­ties out­side of the present failed sys­tem, or con­tin­ue along the same path in the hope that some­how that which has not worked for 70 years will mag­i­cal­ly turn around it­self to evolve the kind of peo­ple and so­ci­ety re­quired.

The task is great and chal­leng­ing, but if we in­sert in­to the ef­fort, imag­i­na­tion and the ca­pac­i­ty for re­vival, then we are like­ly to re­lease our­selves from prison.

Tony Rakhal-Fras­er–free­lance jour­nal­ist, for­mer re­porter/cur­rent af­fairs pro­gramme host and news di­rec­tor at TTT, pro­gramme pro­duc­er/cur­rent af­fairs di­rec­tor at Ra­dio Trinidad, cor­re­spon­dent for the BBC Caribbean Ser­vice and the As­so­ci­at­ed Press, and grad­u­ate of UWI, CARI­MAC, Mona, and St Au­gus­tine–In­sti­tute of In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions.