Newsday Editorial
Wednesday, December 26 2007
Suppose you were a defendant in a court case and, when you went to trial, you discovered that the judge was the employee of the plaintiff? In such a scenario, the judge would have no choice but to recuse himself. It would not matter if he argued that his financial relationship with the plaintiff would not affect his objectivity; or that he was not an employee per se but merely a director; or that he had already admitted to the court that he had a relationship with the plaintiff.
Continue reading Questions for Mr Sinanan
The Manning Ministers have been selectively and actively preaching that the issue of instituting measures to arrest the crime pandemic will always be treated as a politically non-partisan matter. But PM Manning will not practice it and come out from his political crease when the occasion demands.
The voice of the people, we are often reminded, is the voice of God. My rejoinder to this scriptural interpretation of democracy is: the masses so often prove to be asses, one wonders if God has any influence in secular matters like elections, party affiliations, and worst of all, in leaders people choose to anoint or lionise. Six weeks ago close to 200,000 Trinidadians chose Basdeo Panday and the UNC to represent them in Parliament. In fact, a few years ago twice that many among the electorate not only voted him into power, but hoisted him on their shoulders as Prime Minister and paraded him as a lion-king, exemplar supreme.
In a crafty surgical strike designed to stem the upward political mobility of Winston Dookeran and political emergence of Anand Ramlogan, the master puppeteer has resurrected Ramesh from the proverbial political cemetery in which he interned him after the 18-18 tie, 2001 general elections. The predictably blind and politically naive of his declining UNC base supports this resuscitation even though he was stigmatised as the great betrayer.
After undertaking one year of extensive mobilisation against the ingrained forces of political tribalism and maximum leadership styles both of which are deeply embedded in and have determined the contours of T&T politics for the past 52 years, the COP has now achieved 50% of its stated mission on the road to introducing caring, enlightened, issues-based and people-centred and driven politics in T&T under a style of new politics.
In the rest of the civilised world politics is the art of the possible and of compromise. In T&T it degenerated in 2007 into a fine art of naked UNC deception that caused some 190,000 unsuspecting people to be so manipulated that they bought into it with their rustic innocence and hero worship of a badly scarred leader.