16 June 2000, 884 words
Prime Minister Basdeo Panday says he decided not to pay the nurses as a matter of principle. (He actually said that Cabinet had decided this, but since Cabinet consists entirely of yes-men, and two yes-women, I think it safe to say that the no-pay decision was really his.)
In any case, I was quite astonished to hear that Mr. Panday took a decision as a matter of principle. After all, it had never happened before. So, like a good little journalist, I immediately sat down and examined Mr. Panday's past in order to discover exactly what principle he was applying in the nurses' dispute.
Before he became Prime Minister, Mr. Panday spoke a lot about removing the parasitic oligarchy, the need for freedom of speech, instituting meritocracy, and the ills of racial prejudice. After he became Prime Minister, the parasitic oligarchy became his best friends in the world; he increased penalties against persons who engage in public demonstrations; made only cosmetic changes to the education system; and he is pushing a Bill which will stifle freedom of speech if it becomes law. He still, however, rails about racism.
What, then, is the principle here? The superficial mind might conclude that there is none, but my mind is only ordinarily ficial. I can therefore see that there is a very strong principle which informs Mr. Panday's actions, which may be simply stated as follows: Believe in nothing but your own paranoia.
However, I don't think this principle is the one which explains his position in the nurses' dispute (although it does explain the opinions of every Hindu columnist). So I decided it would be more fruitful to look at the principles Mr. Panday has applied only after becoming Prime Minister.
One of his first official acts was to try and muzzle the media. He did this both directly, by calling up editors to boof them and snarling at reporters; and indirectly, through the Green Paper on Media Reform (now reduced to Clause Seven in the Equal Opportunities Bill). He accused the media of publishing lies, half-truths and innuendoes, while he himself just lied outright (about receiving a report on the contract taken out against Ken Gordon and about whether he had discussed the Julian Rogers expulsion issue with Barbadian Prime Minister Owen Arthur). And, at the UNC's third anniversary rally, Mr. Panday targeted the media as the party's enemy and told his supporters to "do dem first".
The principle here is obvious even to the meanest intelligence: Abuse your power by attacking any group which dares to criticize you. (The Hindu columnists don't see this as obvious, because their intelligence is meaningless.)
I now felt I was on the right track, but I still didn't think I had really discovered the principle Mr. Panday was speaking of in the nurses' dispute. What was making my task difficult, I saw, was that Mr. Panday changes his principles more frequently than Oma changes shoes.
I therefore decided to look at his most recent acts to discover what principle he has been applying lately. In the past, Mr. Panday had criticized the PNM for the number of Ministers that administration had. He had also accused the media of wanting to wield political power without facing the electorate.
But, nowadays, Mr. Panday has been using the Senate free sheet to appoint as Government Ministers people whose only qualification is that they have oodles of money to contribute to the UNC coffers. The principle here seems to be that money talks, and b.s. is positively garrulous. But I do not feel this is the principle that is informing Mr. Panday's position, although it does sum up Sat Maharaj.
And then I had an inspiration. The nurses' dispute, it struck me, was a labour issue. I therefore had to look at what Mr. Panday had done as a labour leader to see what principle he used back then, and how he applied it now that he was Prime Minister. One of his best-known acts was to adopt a little Black boy who marched with him, saying that he was a symbol of PNM neglect. That boy was later killed when collecting bottles from the Beetham Dump.
How, you may ask, does this apply to the nurses' dispute? It is really quite simple. Obviously, Mr. Panday doesn't like to pay out money. Some may argue that this isn't true: look at how many millions he has spent on useless things like the Ms. Universe pageant, refurbishing Whitehall, airport expansions, paving the Savannah and his many, many overseas trips.
But all this money was spent either on himself or his friends. Mr. Panday's principle, the one that has made him so adamant about not paying the nurses, then became crystal clear to me. It is, interestingly, a principle which also forms the backbone of the financial sector: Do not give one black cent to people who cannot pay you back with interest.
In other words, if the nurses already had money, Mr. Panday would be willing to give them even more. This is, in fact, the principle which has informed every major decision taken by Mr. Panday since he became Prime Minister. There's now even an economic term for it: it's called "the Ish principle".
Copyright©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh