Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley yes­ter­day re­vealed that the gov­ern­ment is plan­ning on two pos­si­ble amend­ments to the THA Act that will al­low for the break­ing of the po­lit­i­cal dead­lock on the sis­ter isle.

As our read­ers would re­mem­ber, just over a week ago, the peo­ple of To­ba­go vot­ed for a new House of As­sem­bly to gov­ern the is­land. How­ev­er, when the votes were count­ed it end­ed in a 6/6 tie and there­fore a po­lit­i­cal stale­mate.

The chal­lenge is that the THA Act is silent on how such an out­come should be re­solved if both par­ties refuse to co-op­er­ate or some­one from one of the par­ties does not cross the floor to give the oth­er a ma­jor­i­ty.

As a re­sult, no Pre­sid­ing of­fi­cer can be elect­ed, no new Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil in­stalled and the peo­ple’s busi­ness hav­ing to be tak­en care of by what can on­ly be seen as a care­tak­er ad­min­is­tra­tion.

The so­lu­tion that the Prime Min­is­ter and his gov­ern­ment have so far come up with is a mech­a­nism to give au­thor­i­ty to some­one to break the dead­lock and the in­creas­ing of the num­ber of seats to an odd num­ber, there­fore en­sur­ing in the fu­ture, there can be no tie.

There are two things that must hap­pen in our view, the peo­ple of To­ba­go must be giv­en an­oth­er chance to de­cide de­fin­i­tive­ly who will gov­ern then and it must be done quick­ly.

The idea of democ­ra­cy is that the peo­ple must on a reg­u­lar ba­sis de­ter­mine who their lead­ers will be. This en­sures that those in gov­ern­ment and oth­ers try­ing to re­place them, must in the in­ter­im sell their ideas to the peo­ple on how they should be gov­erned. In oth­er words, they must first elect who will lead them and then con­vince the peo­ple that their ap­proach to the process of gov­er­nance and the de­ci­sions they take are in the peo­ple’s best in­ter­est.

What has hap­pened in To­ba­go is that at the mo­ment the peo­ple who form the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil are with­out a man­date to gov­ern.

The spend­ing of pub­lic funds, on what has al­ready been vot­ed for and ap­proved must be the on­ly mon­ey that should be avail­able.

There should be no award of con­tracts un­less it is for crit­i­cal items, no vari­a­tion of funds and even the con­tin­ued per­for­mance of some of the Sec­re­taries like Kwe­si De Vi­gnes who was re­ject­ed by the elec­torate is in ques­tion.

We fear that the route of the EBC hav­ing to find new elec­toral bound­aries is fraught with dan­ger and could even see the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the West hav­ing far more sway on who gov­erns To­ba­go be­cause of its greater pop­u­la­tion cen­tre and its gen­er­al lean­ing to the rul­ing par­ty.

For sure no one is ques­tion­ing the EBC’s in­de­pen­dence in draw­ing up bound­aries, but it will be lim­it­ed by where the peo­ple live and that could throw up par­tic­u­lar out­comes.

More than that the EBC must have the time to do its work and to do it prop­er­ly.

Rush­ing changes in the bound­aries could risk a loss of con­fi­dence in the very sys­tem we are try­ing to fix.