Daly Bread: All farcical and tangled up—between an evasive Govt and an unattractive Opposition 


Many readers will recall the political controversies in which President Anthony Carmona, the immediate predecessor of our current president, was involved—arising out of the purported exercise of powers that he thought he had.

As a result, citizens hoped that the presidency would return to calmer waters, not made turbulent by involvement of the Office of the President in the agendas of politicians.

Photo: Then President Anthony Carmona (right) with his wife Reema.
(Copyright Office of the President)

In an editorial in the Newsday published on 23 December 2017, the writer commented that Carmona’s tenure had highlighted ‘the problematic nature of this anachronistic office amid a modern democracy’ and concluded:

‘The next president must be a person that understands the powers Carmona did not. And the process of appointment of this official should not become enmeshed in politics. We’ve had enough of that from President’s House already.’

Sadly, the Office of the President is again tangled up in partisan politics leading, last Thursday, to an ill-prepared and deficient motion by the Opposition UNC, which proposed the appointment of a tribunal to investigate the President’s conduct.  

As readers know, the context of the motion was the events at President’s House, which led to the collapse of the Police Service Commission.

Photo: President Paula-Mae Weekes (right) presents a letter of appointment to Police Service Commissioner chair Bliss Seepersad.
(Copyright Office of the President)

The Opposition failed–as it was clear that it would–but not exclusively because of insufficient numbers to permit the motion to get off the ground. Opposition backers need to review the lack of competence of the Opposition and its current members, so vividly illustrated by the deficient wording of the charges it brought against the President.

It was also dotish to race into an unexplored area of the Constitution and get caught flat-footed, frustrated and fulminating against the Speaker’s permissible but conservative guidelines, which sucked the breath out of some of the debating theatrics that the Opposition naively assumed it could indulge in to supplement the motion.

The more extravagant of the Opposition voices, sometimes attempting to copycat the words of others, frequently cause the significance of issues to be diluted or permit the Government to evade them in the routine exchange of bacchanal talk.

I respectfully consider that the President got it wrong and took actions that were not supported by the powers vested in her by the Constitution in the course of dealing with the merit list for commissioner of police. 

Photo: President Paula-Mae Weekes (right) and then Commissioner of Police Gary Griffith.
(via Office of the President)

When she did make a statement about the material events, the statement was somewhat aloof and opaque in material respects and a case of ‘this I tell you, this I don’t’.

As already indicated,  the constitutional errors of the President were to participate and acquiesce in a withdrawal of the merit list and to block Parliament out of the process set down in the Constitution for the appointment of a commissioner of police.

However, in view of the now regular anger of this Government at points of view expressed by commentators, it might be useful to remind readers of one of the controversies of the Carmona presidency which arose after the PNM, under Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, regained office. That one concerned a meeting that Carmona held in 2016 with the then Minister of National Security Edmund Dillon to engage Dillon in matters within the Minister’s portfolio.  

As became known in the public domain, I was engaged professionally by the same, now angry, Rowley-led Government to advise whether Carmona acted in a constitutionally proper manner.  

Photo: President Anthony Carmona (right) swears in National Security Minister Edmund Dillon.

My professional opinion that the then President in meeting with Dillon had not acted with constitutional propriety was so well received that someone promptly released it to the media.

On this different occasion, one can accept the Government’s discomfort with my commentaries on the lack of constitutional proprieties surrounding the collapse of the Police Service Commission.  

However, readers may be cynically amused that commentaries by the author of the Carmona opinion, for which I was subsequently engaged, should be met with angry outbursts from the same persons who previously chose the commentator as counsel to advise them.

If the death of democracy is imminent, it is because we have both a Government that evades issues but attempts in vain to stifle reasoned disagreement; and a wholly unattractive Opposition that is mostly a spent force.  

Photo: Then Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar (left) shakes hands with her successor, Dr Keith Rowley, en route to Nelson Mandela’s funeral in South Africa.
(Courtesy News.Gov.TT)

Everything is all dangerously farcical and tangled up.

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About Martin Daly

Martin G Daly SC is a prominent attorney-at-law. He is a former Independent Senator and past president of the Law Association of Trinidad and Tobago. He is chairman of the Pat Bishop Foundation and a steelpan music enthusiast.

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One comment

  1. Mr Editor, is this what Wired868 has become, a platform for individual self-praise?

    I see little point to this column but that.

    I respectfully suggest that we rename the column Yearly Bread and have it appear henceforth only on the author’s birthday. The Wired868 readership will be, I submit, none the poorer for it.

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