03 January 2002, 856 words
Anyone who invokes God to justify their opinions or actions is either deluded or has no rational justification for their opinions or actions. So from the moment President Robinson in his December 24 address said that he "had to turn to the Almighty" to choose a Prime Minister, he demonstrated that he hadn't a clue how to resolve the unprecedented challenge of the 18-18 tie.
His appeal to "moral and spiritual values" provided a specious excuse for the UNC leadership and its core support of Hindu ethnocentrists to accuse the President of religious (and, by implication, racial) bias. Of course, the people making this argument know full well it is spurious.
Robinson's implied criticism in respect to moral deficiency was specific to the Panday administration and, even more specific to Basdeo Panday himself. Where Robinson erred was in not spelling this out clearly: a reticence which could be construed as statesman-like but which, given the theme of his address, I view as moral cowardice.
Still, the reference to morality was clearly made within the context of the oath of office taken by a Government Minister which, said Robinson, "is to discharge his functions conscientiously and impartially in the interest of the people of Trinidad and Tobago and to discharge his duties without favour to anyone but honestly and impartially..."
The Panday regime did not adhere to this oath, as the several multi-million dollar contracts given to party financiers show. But Vernon Bogdanor, a professor of government at Oxford University, argued in a UNC-solicited opinion that the allegations of corruption were a matter for the courts to investigate and were not therefore an allegation upon which the President could adjudicate.
The problem is that the courts of this country do not have investigative powers. But there was in fact one act of corruption on which the courts had already passed judgement: the denial of a cellular licence to the CCN Group, in which the courts found Prime Minister Basdeo Panday to be biased against the Group.
Had Robinson confined his argument to rule of law, this one concrete example would have sufficed (although it would still have given him no authority to appoint a Prime Minister; and Bogdanor correctly pointed out that the President's role is "to give effect to agreed solutions reached by others, not to seek to impose one himself" - a strange idea, of course, in our maximum leader culture). But Robinson didn't even try the rational approach. Instead, he tried to appeal to populist ignorance by invoking spiritual and moral values.
Both Panday and Patrick Manning also employ this tactic. The UNC was, in fact, sufficiently worried about Robinson's moral condemnation so that, in its rally last Saturday at Macoya, the party actually had representatives of Islam, Christianity and Hinduism give lectures on spirituality and morality (all of which depended on appeals to divine authority and none of which referred even tangentially to ethical principles).
The PNM also has no hesitation about appealing to superstition to win political support. Manning is a born-again Christian who has to bless the official cars before he rides in them, but who has no problem appointing as Ministers several individuals whose financial histories reveal their professional ethics to be rather less than rigorous.
Manning's ethical principles are also loose enough to appoint his wife as Education Minister. Mrs. Manning, also a devout Christian, sees no ethical problem in accepting the post, and thinks it sufficient justification that other West Indian prime ministers have done the same. (She even approvingly cited Grenada's Eric Gairy as one of those PMs who gave his wife a job: an argument that bespeaks political ignorance of the highest order.)
This is a typical characteristic of the religiously smug: they think being moral absolves them from acting moral. More significantly, though, Manning's appointments show in retrospect that Robinson lacked even a moral basis to choose Manning since - bearing in mind that morality is defined by one's attitude whereas ethicality is defined by one's actions - there is no real moral distinction between Panday and Manning.
The ethical rigor of the Bogdanor opinion, which argues that Panday should have been re-appointed, stands in stark contrast to Robinson's waffling. I do not by this mean that Bogdanor was correct, since it is not merely ethical - nor even, strictly speaking, legal - principles which would have determined what was the right thing to do in the current situation. But Bogdanor's adherence to intellectual rigor makes his views far more persuasive than Robinson's.
It's not that Robinson is incapable of intellectual rigor. The deficiencies of his December 24 address have more to do with culture than mental capacity. On matters which require rational analysis and action, such as social policy and governance, our leaders prefer to apply primal and superstitious and self-serving values.
They can get away with that because the majority of people in this place are primal and superstitious and self-serving. The challenge of the 18-18 deadlock is just another instance of how the religious mentality helps stultify our development as a nation.
Copyright ©2002 Kevin Baldeosingh