Basdeo Panday, the former T&T Prime Minister (PM), who passed recently, entered Trinidadian politics as far back as 1966, when, as a newly-minted London-trained lawyer, he was a candidate for the new Farmers and Workers Party (FWP) in that year’s General Election, the first after Trinidad achieved independence in 1962. It was significant that the FWP rejected the ethnically directed mobilization of the then two dominant parties, the PNM and DLP, and focused on representing the working peoples of all ethnicities. Panday never deviated from this line for the rest of his long political career, and it was operationalized when he finally became PM in 1995.
He, however, ruefully concluded that the form of the Westminster-based political structure, inherited from the British, channelled political participation and representation in ways that were not salutary for his ethnically plural society. Ten years ago, after he had retired from politics, he expanded on the need for deep constitutional reform to create more apt political structure, and summarized his views on what such reform should institutionalize. Because our society is very similar to Trinidad’s in its ethnic fissures – and we are embarking on a constitutional reform exercise – it might be useful to consider Mr Panday’s proposals.
He first rejected the usual procedure of appointing “experts” as Commissioners to create a draft Constitution that would then be presented to “the people” for their approval. “Since the purpose of the Constitution (put in non-academic language)is to promote the welfare and happiness of the people, then what the commissioners should be doing is finding out from the ordinary masses of the people what they – the people – perceive to be their problems; not what they think of a draft or what are their recommendations for constitutional reform.”
Substantively, based on working in the system for almost fifty years, Panday interestingly proposed that T&T should abandon the FPTP constituency in favour of PR, which we already have here. He also felt that there should be a single Chamber of Parliament and an Executive Presidency like ours. But significantly, he proposed that, “The President should be elected by the people on the basis of one-man-one-vote. Having been so elected, the President should be empowered to select his Cabinet from (in his view) the most capable persons in the country, who are not members of the legislature. Having selected his Cabinet, the President is then both the Head of State and the Head of the Government.”
As is the case in the US, there would be introduced a more complete separation of powers between the Executive and Legislative branches, since, even though the incumbents might belong to the same party, the President would not be in a position to control the legislators through appointments etc. He suggested: “At the beginning of each year, the President addresses the nation, informing the people of his/her programme for the ensuing year. He must then go to the Parliament for funding of his programme.” This programme would be a contract between the Govt and the people.
Mr. Panday also saw the need for more independent Commissions and state bodies: “One of the biggest problems the framers of the new Constitution shall have is how, in a small society such as ours, do you find truly ‘independent’ people to fill critical positions on such organisations as the Integrity Commission, the Elections and Boundaries Commission, the Public Service Commission, etc? Having regard to the class nature of our society and our historical antecedents of colonialism, slavery and indenture that have shaped our culture, that may very well be an impossible task. The way to ensure that there is no discrimination in the performance of the functions of such critical organisations may well lie in not looking for “independent” persons, but rather in balancing the composition of such organisations with representation from the various interest groups in the society.”
Rather significantly, even though at several points on his political journey Mr Panday had coalesced with various groups and parties to contest elections, he did not recommend “executive shared governance” to address the challenge of governing his ethnically plural society.
