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The People’s National Movement (the PNM) tersely announced last week: “The People’s National Movement wishes to advise that its 51st Annual Convention, as well as the internal election, originally scheduled for Sunday 17 November 2024, has been cancelled.”
The PNM is currently the party in government having been elected for five-year terms in 2015 and 2020. The PNM’s cancellation notice is disturbing.
Photo: Office of the Parliament 2024
It is a decision that goes beyond party business. If the decision stands it will become another impairment to our practice of democracy.
To our country’s considerable credit, we have survived as a reasonably democratic country because, first and foremost, our general elections have been held when constitutionally due and we have had peaceful changes of democratically elected governments.
The PNM must receive considerable credit for following the Constitution in that respect.
Secondly to our credit as an independent democratic country, we have been tested but have survived two periods of intense internal turmoil—in 1970 and 1990 respectively—when on both occasions the constitutionally established government might have been overthrown.
(Copyright Trinidad Express)
Thirdly, to our credit, there has been no significant or lasting overt curtailment of media freedom and freedom of expression, despite ongoing and regular attempts of intimidation.
On the debit side, we have not done well with the practice of accountability and we focus political disagreement on personality and on an opponent’s origins and not on policy.
Moreover, when tested, many of our institutions designed to be a check on the abuse of power have responded weakly, as their personnel have allowed themselves to be manipulated for a partisan purpose.
When such abuses of power occur, a few robust commentators generally point them out. But there are those within the establishment and others, who are equally diligently seeking to eat ah food, frequently in gluttonous portions, who condone the abuses or silently acquiesce.
Fellow columnist, Noble Philip, boldly stated last Sunday: “There is a clique of parasitic, non-productive elites, who barter support for political parties in exchange for control of the national income (Panday 1994).”
He cited Basdeo Panday, presumably in recognition of the late former prime minister’s reference to the “parasitic oligarchy”, to describe those who controlled the money and power in our vulnerable island nation.
In light of the above, our democratic scorecard should be marked “functioning but flawed”. However, we must be careful that our marking is not downgraded to: “democracy practiced but disrupted”.
(via TTPS)
A disruption of our democracy is not on a distant horizon given our disastrous and unchecked level of criminality.
Meanwhile, I am concerned that the PNM cancellation notice represents an impairment of our democracy of a stealthy kind.
The top leadership of the PNM probably fears that a convention and internal elections at this time would permit party members to express dissatisfaction with some of the party’s grievous acts and omissions while in government and to speak against the handpicking of candidates and successors to the current leadership.
Photo: PNM
Cancellation of an opportunity to influence different choices and to disrupt plans to promote hand-picked favourites of the parasitic oligarchy behind the scenes into high positions is anti-democratic.
Is there now a significant split between the social PNM and the grassroots PNM within the ministerial and executive levels of the party over preferences for political foster children?
Historically we have changed the incumbent party in government when driven by a ‘vote dem out’ sentiment. Dissatisfaction with the incumbent government festers long and then, bam!, extreme tolerance reaches breaking point.
Photo: Allan V Crane/ Wired868
We may be at that point now.
The PNM leadership and some of its current ghastly ministerial failures need to face the democratic reckoning of its own membership before the party can have credibility as a choice for the wider citizenry.
The problem for the wider public is that the opposition United National Congress (UNC) has split and is unlikely to offer any attractive choices of candidates.
Photo: UNC
The suppression of the PNM membership’s influence over its candidates and leadership successors deprives us of the possibility that the members offered some slim hope of forcing refreshed choices when the coming general election is held.
Will only more stale or recycled choices be placed on the election ballot papers?
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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.
