ELEVEN IN ONE TERM

Mar 30, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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The Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago has become a folk hero for some in Guyana. Is it that they so much admire the Prime Minister?
If so, they have been strangely silent on her performance. Not a peep of praise was showered on her in the local media before this past week. So is she really that admired in Guyana? Or is it merely a case of convenient adulation because her recent firing of one of her Ministers for allegedly misbehaving in public is political fodder to question why the same thing has not happened in Guyana?
Had she not fired a minister, and thus allowed critics of the PPPC government in Guyana to claim that nothing like that has ever happened here, would she ever have enjoyed the admiration of those in Guyana who are now praising her recent actions.
The Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago has either fired or let go of some eleven ministers during her still uncompleted first term. This must be something of a record. She still has a year to go before elections.  And as a recent editorial in the Trinidad Express noted, the number of firings in one term raises concerns about her selections.
In none of the previous cases where the Trinidad Prime Minister has fired or let go of her Ministers has she received the sort of public adulation as is being showered on her now in Guyana. She is being held up as a woman of substance, someone who is to be admired for the way she deals with matters.
Amongst those who have received the boot from the Prime Minister was Collin Partab, a former Minister in the Ministry of National Security. He was fired as a Minister after he was charged with failing to submit to a breathalyzer test. He has since been fined by the Courts for this offence. He was not asked to step down until his case had been completed; he was let go.
The memory of his removal from the government may have been fresh in the minds of those who were suggesting that a Guyanese Minister who recently was involved in an accident did not take a breathalyzer test. It never dawned on them how absurd this suggestion was, since the Minister was never asked to take such a test, having left to reportedly seek treatment after his accident.
The Partab case in Trinidad did, however, raise an important consideration. Should a Minister be removed from office or forced to resign simply for a misdemeanour offence? If, for example, a Minister of the government was to make a mistake in judgment on the road, something that every driver is liable to do at sometime or the other, and if this mistake results in a minor accident, should that Minister be punished by being put out of a job?
Another person who was let go was the former Minister of Justice, Herbert Volney. He was the victim from the fallout of the Article 34 controversy. He was reportedly fired on the grounds that he misled Cabinet on this issue.
Instead of Volney having to resign, the Article 34 controversy should have led to the resignation of the entire opposition. They passed the amendment and when they realized that it would benefit certain financiers of the United National Congress (UNC), the main party in the People’s Partnership, they protested in the streets of Trinidad against a measure that they had supported in the National Assembly.
They all missed the fact that Article 34 was a patently just proposal. It provides for the Court to dismiss or strike out a charge against someone who has been awaiting the conclusion of his or her trial for more than ten years. Whatever happened to justice delayed is justice denied?
Volney became a political casualty of the histrionics of the opposition People’s National Movement (PNM) over the passage of this amendment which they concluded was intended to grant freedom to some top financiers of the UNC who were facing corruption charges which have been languishing in the courts for over a decade. Incidentally, Volney has since his dismissal appeared back on a UNC platform.
The Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago has been commended for the swift action she took in firing both Minister Glenn Ramadharsingh and before that Collin Partab. In the case of Partab, he was fired within hours of being charged. In the case of Ramadharsingh, he was let go even though he had apologized, and even though he has not and is not likely to face criminal prosecution for making a scene on a Caribbean Airlines flight.
This swiftness of the removal of both Partab and Dr. Ramadharsingh contrasts with the lengthy time it took to let go of Jack Warner, the former Minister of National Security and Chairman of the United National Congress. He has been the subject of many controversies.
He was not let go when the allegations arose over the distribution of monies at a CONCACAF meeting. He was not removed as a Minister after FIFA opted for an ethics committee hearing on the matter and after provisionally suspending him. He resigned from FIFA, which was then obligated to not proceed with the ethics committee hearing. Questions continued to swirl around him based on reports in the media. It was not until two years after when CONCACAF published its Integrity Committee Report that he was forced to resign as a Minister.
His survival within the government and party raised questions as to whether he was a political untouchable and indeed whether there was a cabal within the upper echelons of government who were untouchables, since some of them had also attracted controversy.
While therefore it is good to see Ministers being removed for their private indiscretions as well as for their performance in office, in the case of Trinidad and Tobago, it may be too premature at this stage to argue that Guyana’s Executive President should follow the example of the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.

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