Tony Rakhal-Fras­er

A sur­vey to de­ter­mine what have been the costs to the na­tion for the de­vel­op­men­tal fail­ures of suc­ceed­ing gov­ern­ments over the last 50 years to pro­duc­tive­ly man­age the econ­o­my, the poli­ty, and the so­ci­ety in the best in­ter­est of Trinidad and To­ba­go is des­per­ate­ly need­ed. The sur­vey pe­ri­od is ex­cel­lent for analy­sis, as it takes in­to reck­on­ing the tenure of the three ma­jor par­ty-based gov­ern­ments which have been in pow­er since In­de­pen­dence in 1962.

Those be­ing the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment, the Na­tion­al Al­liance for Re­con­struc­tion, and the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress with its coali­tion part­ners.

It’s a re­search agen­da for our so­cial sci­en­tists who fo­cus on the spe­cial­ist ar­eas of eco­nom­ics, econo­met­rics, man­age­ment, pol­i­tics, so­ci­ol­o­gy and his­to­ry, busi­ness and labour, the cred­it unions, the NGO sec­tor, and cit­i­zens rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the whole.

There ex­ist a num­ber of de­vel­op­ment pro­grammes which have been put for­ward over a cou­ple of decades, with the fo­cus on what can be done. What I am ad­vo­cat­ing is a project to find out, be­yond po­lit­i­cal ole talk, self-prop­a­gat­ed par­ty/gov­ern­ment claims and counter-claims, what bad de­ci­sions and ac­tions were tak­en, and with what con­se­quences? Why have gov­ern­ments and po­lit­i­cal par­ties ig­nored po­ten­tial­ly good pro­grammes start­ed by one ad­min­is­tra­tion when they have tak­en over the pow­er?

Two ex­am­ples of such are eas­i­ly ap­par­ent: the Off­shore Pa­trol Ves­sels, which the PNM Gov­ern­ment con­tract­ed and which the suc­ces­sor UNC Gov­ern­ment con­demned, claim­ing that the prob­lems of crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties are on land, not out to sea. Cit­i­zens al­so need to know the truth be­hind the claim of the UNC that the PNM in gov­ern­ment wil­ful­ly re­fused to bring in­to op­er­a­tion the Cou­va Chil­dren’s Hos­pi­tal and what has been the cost of the same in loss of ser­vice to chil­dren every­where in the coun­try.

The re­search will al­so have to give a clear in­sight in­to in­stances when projects have been em­barked up­on on the ba­sis of po­lit­i­cal and trib­al ge­og­ra­phy. Has there been a link­age be­tween the es­tab­lish­ment of projects and the con­tri­bu­tions of po­lit­i­cal in­vestors? This is an­oth­er re­search ques­tion to find out, along with the cost to the na­tion. The lat­ter was com­plained bit­ter­ly about by Prime Min­is­ter Per­sad-Bisses­sar in re­cent times, when she threat­ened “buss head” treat­ment for those who en­gaged in cor­rupt prac­tices. 

Of great val­ue will be the rev­e­la­tion of the cost of mo­bil­is­ing elec­tors pure­ly on par­ty and trib­al lines and how that has served to place elec­tors in camps and the even­tu­al neg­a­tive im­pact it has had on the ad­vance of the na­tion state of T&T in pro­duc­tive har­mo­ny.

The re­searchers must find the costs of de­vel­op­ment fail­ures be­cause of the po­lit­i­cal wars fought over the decades for the ap­pli­ca­tion of bias and trib­al pref­er­ences in­stead of pro­fes­sion­al judge­ments.

As a re­sult of poli­cies de­ter­mined by cri­te­ria oth­er than those that will favour na­tion build­ing, the cost of large chunks of the poli­ty be­ing sucked in­to the vor­tex of the di­vid­ed and dis­tort­ed so­ci­ety must be known.  

Why a con­tin­u­ing fail­ure since the 1970s to find con­sti­tu­tion­al ground to al­low To­ba­go to achieve the ob­jec­tives of want­i­ng to em­bark on a course of self-re­liance and suf­fi­cien­cy? Why has the ide­al not been achieved in the in­ter­est of a unit­ed twin-is­land state? These are re­search ques­tions.

So too the re­search must find out the cost of dishar­mo­ny in all its forms, the warp­ing of the log­ic of groups of cit­i­zens un­able to emerge in­to a so­ci­ety of eth­nic work­ing and play­ing to­geth­er while re­tain­ing cul­tur­al and an­ces­tral iden­ti­ty.

What have been the costs to the na­tion when gen­uine tal­ents have been side­lined to al­low race and par­ty af­fil­i­a­tion to pre­vail?

The ob­jec­tives of the re­search are to show the in­ad­e­qua­cy of nar­row po­lit­i­cal mo­bil­i­sa­tion and the or­gan­i­sa­tion and man­age­ment of the so­ci­ety and to demon­strate that all el­e­ments of the coun­try have suf­fered from tra­di­tion­al par­ty af­fil­i­a­tion and that the na­tion has been short-changed for al­low­ing dis­rup­tive ide­olo­gies and ob­jec­tives to pre­vail.

One of the things such a re­search project will do is to ex­pose the in­com­pe­tence and po­lit­i­cal spite­ful­ness of suc­ceed­ing gov­ern­ments and to quan­ti­fy the ben­e­fits de­nied to the na­tion be­cause of nar­row provin­cial, race, and par­ty-based pol­i­tics over the best in­ter­ests of the na­tion.  

This must be a na­tion­al project of the elec­torate, cit­i­zens, whether or not vot­ers, mem­bers of the par­ties, the cor­po­ra­tions, and those who want to move away from the po­lit­i­cal shake­down of the cam­paign­ing sea­son, which al­lows par­tic­u­lar groups of cit­i­zens to ex­pe­ri­ence ex­treme ben­e­fits.

The abil­i­ty to pull to­geth­er a na­tion-re­deem­ing project is a ma­jor re­quire­ment of na­tion­hood. It can bring the peo­ple of a coun­try to­geth­er to re­move them­selves from the stran­gle­hold that politi­cians, their par­ties, and their el­e­vat­ed elites now have so­ci­ety wedged in­to.

What I have stat­ed above is not meant to be a fin­ished doc­u­ment for the re­new­al of the so­ci­ety, but rather a set of lim­it­ed sug­ges­tions, not ful­ly thought through, but de­signed to en­gage large groups of cit­i­zens in an ex­er­cise to free our­selves from the bondage of par­ties and their trib­al and self-pro­mot­ing ob­jec­tives.

Tony Rakhal-Fras­er is a 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.