Guyana Caribbean Politics

The amendments and revisions we propose to undertake to the Constitution as the basic law of the land are mostly a paper transaction. They come to life as reforms of the way we actually proceed only to the extent that political culture drives them one way or another.

The agency which drives them is the political party which mobilises and organises collective effort. Whatever the form and shape it takes, the party as agency cannot be escaped-except where there is no politics and only government and administration. The issue that is now before the country is whether-and how-we are going to establish politics and invent parties for the first time. As we can see, it is an infinitely tortuous process-wholly beyond our experience. It is not that we need new politics. What we need is to convert politics into a valid enterprise.The question is: how do we achieve enduring bases of political solidarity? It is here that much confusion is engendered over the meaning and role of ethnicity.

In all situations, politics is premised on ethnic solidarity in the following sense: Automatically and without giving it a thought persons recognise others as being one of their own, expected to share and espouse the identical politics.

To the extent that there do exist such cores of automatic and unquestioned solidarity, the central role of ethnicity as cause of both division and integration in politics cannot be escaped. The challenge is to isolate and identify what factors in society form a basis for bonding that can be described as ethnic and in what context, under what circumstances and in what climate. It is therefore a mistake to equate-as so many do-ethnicity with race. Race, as Professor Kenny has reminded us, is not a scientific concept. It arises out of political perceptions which do not faithfully reflect the unique biological source of humans but which, at the same time, are manifest to the observer.

Everyone recognises what is meant by a West Indian Afro, Indo, French Creole, Euro, Potogee, Chinee, Dougla, Chigro, Syrian, Brown Man and Red Man. Less easily, though increasingly, we are becoming familiar with differences between Guyanese, Trinidadians, Tobagonians, Bajans and Jamaicans-although there's still difficulty separating one "Small Islander" from another.

Even in cricket there is the matter of "insularity"-meaning that island of origin is one important basis for solidarity. Clearly, race as perceived is only another. On a world scale, clusters of automatic solidarity can be-and are-formed on the basis of no logic other than the self-view combined with the view of the Other. We end up with bondings based on a wide variety of factors such as tribe, clan, colour, caste, class, religion, etc.

It is here that specific conditions play their role.A given factor enjoys a significance that it may not possess at other places, times and moments.

In Nigeria the seminal difference is taken to divide Hauser from Ibo from Yoruba. In Sri Lanka it is taken to be the difference between Singhalese, Old Tamils and New Tamils.In India, Hindus and Muslims. In the Middle East, Shi'ites and Sunnis. In the Balkans, Muslims, Roman Catholic Christians and Russian Orthodox Christians.

These are all clearly ethnic factors and we acknowledge that. It underlines the confusion sown when we attempt to draw distinctions between the racial, the cultural and the religious etc.

Race is a basis of ethnic solidarity but ethnic solidarity is not necessarily racial.

Here in Trinidad and Tobago it ought to be obvious that a primary ethnic difference-which is not racial-separates Trinidadians from Tobagonians and provides a fertile basis for assessment of the national politics which we have,at crucial moments,ignored at great cost.

We have seen that the perceived racial difference between Afros and Indos is almost universally regarded as the driving force in political life. However, it has never furnished the wherewithal for effective political organisation. The ethnicity that surfaces as racial parties simply has not possessed the conviction and, therefore, the drive required to activate leadership capable of going beyond Governor domination and One-Man Rule. We have attributed this to a debilitatingly low culture of intellectual life, the result of the legacy of our peopling and of our failure to rise out of mere proletarian preoccupations. We have nevertheless discerned that what is at play in the turmoil that has now engulfed the main opposition party might well bea fresh new dynamic, one that may be more important even than the evolving demographics or the struggle for leadership that it clearly is as well.

The compelling requirement is a clinical and empirical review of how ethnicity has actually functioned in Trinidad and Tobago. The custom among the intellectual and academic classes has been to adopt,wholesale, a paradigm borrowed from nineteenth century Europe, one that elevates class into the significant line of demarcation, necessitating the retreat to race now seen to be wholly sterile. It is only of late that we have begun to acknowledge what the more effective bonding groups have been:Tobagonians; French Creoles; Presbyterians; Hindus; Muslims; Butlerites; Garveyites; Afro Saxons and None of the Above.

The turbulence of recent decades has introduced elements of incalculability into the boundaries of these categories which therefore should be no more than a starting point for tracking development. Political parties can only be coalitions of groups that are bonding as a matter of course.

The old structures of government without politics have broken irretrievably down. We have to displace them with an entirely new dispensation, requiring perhaps an entirely new concept. To weld the pieces together we need a party of parties anchored in the reality. How would such a thing be possible? How would we proceed from where we are now? First of all, we need some precise detailing of strategic requirements.

By the nature of our society, the West Indies began with government from above as a matter of official necessity-just to have the place organised and run. By contrast, politics from below, as an integral and informal aspect of daily life, has been by law proscribed and later by tradition taboo-save as periodic agitation or full scale revolt. These traditions have on the whole survived the advent of self government and regular elections. Some of the role of agitation and almost all of the role of rebellion and revolt have been trimmed and passed to electioneering and campaigning.

Owing largely to this focus on government rather than politics, we still take system change to mean amendment to the Constitution much more than refurbishing of the political order with its accent on capability of community and vibrancy of party. These patterns have been all along reinforced by reliance on Executive grace and the habit of nomination to positions, whether in Parliament or in Government. The practice of election and the exercise of rights to representation have been slow to take root.

Notwithstanding the weight of habit and practice, the responsibilities of operating an independent society and State have been pressing us to change. The main requirement for adapting the Constitution to our own needs is to install truly representative arrangements so that the great number of national voices may make themselves heard. Most of the other problems we keep wallowing in would more or less solve themselves if authentic spokesmen were to become active on the account of the general public. We do not therefore need to expend energies on the multiplicity of trite issue that arises only because responsible and competent representation is nowhere in sight.

Representation has two sides: the participation of the politician in the affairs of government and State and his\her effective expression of the interests of the community. If the constitutional arrangements for the operation of the State need to be adapted, so equally do the political arrangements for the effective participation of the community. Some have argued, most insistently John Spence, that reorganisation of the party system is much more important now in T&T than comprehensive amendment to the Constitution.

Spence is probably both right and wrong. The party system is decisive; but our gaze is still so fixed on the Constitution the issue may well be which amendments might serve to trigger fresh initiatives on the part of the community and the parties. Here we've suggested that if the Executive and the Legislature were converted to a House of Government and a House of Parliament respectively, a number of compatible changes could be called into existence with great economy and easy comprehension.

Nevertheless certain alterations to the party system remain indispensable to any serious advance. The essential requirement is to bring into the open the long standing but covert commitment of the parties to a politics of fertile coalition. The great barrier to any such leap to rationality is neither the politics of ethnic mobilisation nor the traditional reliance on race as the most ready basis of ethnic bonding. It is the willful absence of educated elites.

Despite the chimera of the rabble rousing national movement of the mid 1950s, we've scarcely had more than the politics of victimhood and protest. We've never heard any committed cadre willing and able to offer to the nation philosophies, programmes and plans that express its deepest urges for a sovereign State, an equitable society and the fullest democratic participation. Alas, under the hegemony of maximum leadership, party politics, like everything else, has passed into yellow leaf. It is definitively stunted to such an extent that maximum leadership has now also stunted itself with little or no possibility of growing in any direction.

At the turn to the new millennium, this development was heralded by events that few of us realised were not as novel as we thought. We saw that it was not merely the Parliament that was now stymied; it was the entire country. The contestation between the ceremonial and instrumental branches of the Executive, each with its own alignments and constituencies, only made patent what had long been evident.

The resolution that the then President opted for was, however, no more than a band-aid. What we were manifestly in need of was a new party dispensation, one that we could by no means just call into existence but that we could still have set in train in one of two ways. Either we could have lent primacy to the Legislature over the Executive when three Government members defected and gave the House of Representatives sufficient resources to mount a new government without new elections; or by compelling the tied parties to fashion a solution on their own initiatives within the confines of the stymied House.

Robinson twice missed the boat. At no stage did he discern how the situation could be retrieved. We are still to count the full costs of the solution he settled for. It could be an opening for the politics of coalition.

Demand for a new political formation in T&T is widespread. However, not many seem to agree or realise that a few well-chosen amendments to the Constitution (as law) could trigger a process of re-configuration and revitalisation of our political life-and yet without jeopardising the legitimate interests of the parties, non-established or established. There is something else that only a small number of us seem to be aware of. Over the years since Independence, parties have made enormous efforts to arrive at arrangements based on hard experience that might work towards progress. Sadly these attempts have been systematically torpedoed.

The system of ideas which has been informing the constitutional discussion as well as the debate on the Constitution has been counter-productive for being only nominally linked to the empirical record. We need to take the historical analysis at least back to 1971. We've learnt lessons we've only been prevented from putting to use by the tremendous build-up of anxiety and noise you get when the perceptions and the commentary have no link to what is real.

The main thing we've learnt is that we cannot go on without lifting the burden of one-man rule (in its Caribbean variant) that we've been subject to. Admittedly there is only a dim recognition of the way maximum leadership works in these English-speaking islands-through a tight central power that is neither tyranny nor dictatorial rule but, on the contrary, enjoys a huge popular support.

Once we remain empirical and anchored in the historical reality of Caribbean power over the 350 to 500 years, this apparent paradox is not as difficult to unravel as it seems. What we're used to is not Legislative representation as a matter of right but Executive representation as a matter of grace. The whole WI tradition is one of nomination not election. We're seeing now the value of Gocking's thesis about the power of the old representative system the Colonial Office dismantled in the 19th Century and replaced by the Crown Colony model it had invented specifically for Trinidad.

In the current WI system the centre of gravity is still firmly at the top. The premises of the Westminster system it thinks it has copied have been the very antithesis, ever since the nobles set limits to the King and extended the sovereignty to the people later. Any feeling of being left out on the part of the WI public is therefore relatively new. The current constitution debate is entirely mechanical and without passion. At best, our people feel that we may somehow be sovereign; but we've not yet reached the stage where we're in a position to think it. Only faint stirrings.

We're still essentially content with one-man rule so long as there is reason -or pretext-for believing the man is in position to dispense Executive grace. Here is the way ethnic politics-especially when based on race-serves to facilitate the resurgence of the original WI system of government and politics predicated on exclusion. The theme of our times is therefore an innate ambivalence. We've wanted to escape through a simple set of arrangements meant to secure representation from which would follow any number of amendments and changes in sympathy and support. But we've not really pushed.

If we've not advanced beyond vague aspiration encrusted in futility, it is largely that the official and educated discussion has never focussed the matter of representation uncluttered. It's only at the level of pure popular impulse that we've managed to keep possibility open-mostly through attempts to achieve effective Legislative representation from below. Repeatedly the parties have sought to establish-or have groped towards-some edition of a party of parties to transcend political organisation and electoral mobilisation on the basis of race that nobody believes in.

In the campaign of 1971, the DLP of Jamadar and Lequay made approaches in turn to UNIP's Millette, Tapia's Best and DAC's Robinson. In the campaign of 1976, the assembled Opposition sought to convert the United Labour Front into the United People's Front. Both those attempts were sabotaged by Robinson's insistence on his own eminence effectively vehicled by the call for the traditional unitary (and one-man) party.

In 1981, Tapia insisted on the Alliance as a party of parties capable of surviving and growing beyond the election. In 1986 the party of parties gave way to the illusion of the unitary party, driven par excellence by vaulting ambition. In 1995 and 1996, opportunity was again missed by DAC's inability and Manning's refusal to see the requirement and by Hulsie Bhaggan's infatuation with running rather than with waiting and building -though she did see the compelling logic of "a party of the centre."

In 2001 President Robinson simply did not see that the split in the UNC offered to T&T a perfectly valid chance to give precedence to the Legislature over the Executive. In 2002 he preferred to do the opposite. He duly installed government without parliament and once more set us back.

Not surprising how pessimistic has been the response to my proposal for a new party of parties. Most think we have a crisis of leadership beyond retrieving. Manning and Panday are no good; there are no replacements in sight. We don't see that the problem lies precisely with this flawed and leader-centred view. The only model we know is maximum leader. Doctor Politics is the be-all. Since the incumbents do not fit the bill, we think we're stymied.

Never as now have we had such opportunity for a new dispensation. The whole world is aware the old model does not work. But for meaningful change, we have to be scientific and clinical, willing to work with what we have. No point complaining over what we do not have. We need instruments to suit the situation as it is. This implies facing up to what's on the ground and moving to arrangements all players can agree to - both for individual advantage and for the benefit of the country as a whole.

I have at every stage made such proposals; but there was no reason anybody should trust them - not until time had brought legitimacy and the country itself would have learnt from experience and acquired better judgment. There've been few academics or journalists worth the name. Least of all in the University is there anything like a culture of intellectual life. Almost all reporting and analysis are aligned. The public is left to assume sharks everywhere, proceeding without consistency, principle or honour.

The case for a party of parties rests on the view that, while T&T politics is ethnic, meaning that bonding is automatic and almost mindless, it's not especially racial. There is no academic, on any campus, insightful enough to have made this distinction. Race is indeed the vehicle of electoral mobilisation but is much less the basis of political organisation. Between one campaign and another, there is little promotion of racial causes. Indos and Afros quarrel endlessly over the spoils of office; but there's no concept anywhere about even approximating to apartheid. The amazing thing is how immersed Indos are in Afro-Saxon culture, even the so-called Hindu core struggling to be different. The basis of mobilisation by race has been two-fold: the intellectual bankruptcy of the educated elites and their pathetic dependence on half-arsed versions of 19th Century European radicalism; and the heavy demographic concentration in two geographical areas. We've scarcely had any option save and except to qualify race by some more nearly rational if still intuitive appeal to perceived common interest. Ethnic solidarity has led to nine distinct electoral tribes.

These are the "unadulterated" Afro-Saxon core; the Black Power or Garveyite fringe, unwilling to sacrifice the African connection; the Butlerites committed to Trades Union solidarity; the Tobagonians loathe to lose their island identity; the "unadulterated" Hindu core; the Presbyterians; the devotees of Islam; the French Creoles holding desperately to the aristocracy of colour; and the Nowherians to whom all the others seem anathema.

This is a wholly empirical reading, unsullied by ideology. It rests on the planks of ethnic bonding operational among us at present: race, proletarian "class", colour, religion, continent of origin, island of affiliation. It allows us to proceed to an architecture that makes some sense of the facts.

The imperative is to acknowledge two big voting blocks. Afro-Saxons and Hindus will never go away. They are cores around which smaller identities revolve in one form of "coalition" or another. The second requirement follows. It is a model flexible enough to permit formations to change their mind and switch their affiliation, according to current interest, long term opportunity, issue, etc. This could be a very workable scheme operated under the auspices of two parties of parties, retaining a model we're already familiar with. It sits well with our parallel proposal for a constitution reform in which effective representation in a legislature would come alive and in which proportional representation would be conceded as a wholly valid claim.

An arrangement such as this would not be as novel as appears. James' departure from PNM in 1961 triggered a steady stream of defections culminating in UNIP, NJAC, DAC and ONR; and in a massive crossover to UNC of Presbyterians and Muslims in 1996. By skillful manoeuvring, Williams slowed the demise of PNM precisely by the informal party of parties he maintained-subject only to the hegemony of the Maximum Leader.

The third requirement is therefore to free the politics from the one-man rule that Robinson re-imposed in 1986 and let PNM off the hook, at the expense of ONR, ULF, Tapia and T&T and admittedly with the collaboration of Hudson-Phillips and Panday. While Panday has been unquestionably a maximum leader with a record, he is the one party boss ever to have shown some vague appreciation of the way the party of parties could function within the framework of "national unity" that we sketched in the 1981 campaign. He now finds himself now in an especially awkward situation. That could turn out an excellent opportunity for the nation.

The problem lies not so much in the size or share of public investment. It is in the character of investment we undertake ostensibly in pursuit of transformation. This has been most manifest in the most rapidly expanding Caribbean economies. Trinidad and Tobago today is a case in point. High export prices and incomes over the decade of the 1970s led to an immense expansion of new capacity. The steep fall in export prices and incomes has, however, made it virtually impossible to prevent this capacity from remaining inordinately idle or from collapsing altogether. The phenomenon is well known particularly in pre-Castro Cuba. Why then do these economies follow a characteristic investment path and remain in the same historical orbit? The proximate answer is, of course, that these are the biases of existing entrepreneurs in both the public and private sectors. The ultimate answer, however, raises more deep-seated issues.

The post war uncoupling of these colonial economies from their metropolitan links has emphasised the role of the balance of payments as the most critical of the national accounts. It has reduced supplies of foreign exchange much more rapidly than it has affected uses. The progressive uncoupling of industrial growth from growth in commodity demand has since been aggravating the problem. As the scarce resource, foreign exchange has a long-run value which ought in the first place to be reflected in the parity meaning the exchange rate. The structural distortion of an overvalued currency needs to be brought into the open. Which would give signals to producers and consumers that are not a sufficient condition but are a necessary one for appraisal and revaluation of production capabilities by potential entrepreneurs.

Any attempt to initiate the process of correcting such structural distortions by altering exchange rates, comparative input prices and thereby the terms of collaboration between domestic and external factors and resources will of course come up against other considerations. The scale and the rapidity of the response by domestic production will depend in part on the flexibility of endowments. In an important sense, this means space and response time which become factors of production in much the same way as foreign exchange. In the short run, these two factors set very real limits on the levels of output, employment and income to be attained with a given supply of foreign exchange.

And yet these limits could be pushed back by the spending preferences that producers and consumers exercise given any set of prices-and given expectations, if you like. In part, this reduces to a matter of interests. If investment generates income and creates capacity, it also establishes, sustains and/or destroys interests. The investment path of the economy is always to an extent governed by the prevailing pattern of interests. In the context of a Government budget, these interests set constraints on spending options on both re-current and capital account-as, indeed, they do on how much revenue can be raised by taxation and how much borrowing is admissible at home and abroad.

We are here into the realm of political economy, of constraints on economic policy set by politics. It may seem trite to recall that political interests are themselves in part a product of past investment decisions. The value of such an approach however is that it bring the discussion back to the need for a suitable paradigm of society into which to embed the economy. Our current concern with the roles of the private and public sectors quite possibly stems from a particular even unique culture of entrepreneur specialisation. Here in the West Indies, a culture of effective entrepreneurship is yet to be established. The vital policy questions in our region are in many ways specific to place. But we can bring them to the fore only on the basis of an empirical understanding of an historical legacy which accepts economy, society and polity as so many faces of one reality.

I'd be surprised if our confusions of policy in the years since self-government were not in some way related to educated elites brought up on a mix of echoes that joins together the Marxist political economy of 19th Century Europe; the Parsonian sociology - drawn from 20th Century America; the Keynesian economics arising from the collapse of the unrivalled English hegemony in the late decades of the 19th century; and the anthropology of Malinowski-based on his studies in the Trobriand Islands.

Too much of the discussion in this region-as in the other new states - is a vast confusion because of these overlapping frames of reference. We already are obliged to admit that we do not in the final analysis know how economies throw up effective entrepreneurs. We do have the case of Japan where the hoped-for miracle was achieved, where notions of public and private sector or of socialism and capitalism seem to have had meanings different from what they'd earlier acquired; and where the behaviour of workers and consumers requires interpretations highly individual to the Atlantic mind.

We do have clues as to the importance of self-knowledge and self-regard in fashioning openings through the kind of historical impasse the West Indian economy has faced for quite a few decades now. Reconstruction can begin in earnest only with a proper exploration of the career of the Caribbean, of the way the present has been created out of the past. Perhaps if the population shared that self-knowledge; or at least, if the responsible elites were master of it, we might see options for freeing ourselves from the shackles of colonial economy and culture.

I recalled that I visited Lisbon in 1961 at a time when I'd chosen to remain open-minded on nationalisation and related issues and to stay on a path of independent thought, even when it was tempting to adopt answers pre-packaged in the experience of others. I was meant to speak on political aspects of the public sector. I've taken a wider view. In Lisbon, the pig skin gloves were not the only thing I bought. Browsing in a bookshop, I stumbled on a copy of Columbus' log published in the original Latin. Because of the prospect it offered, the following paragraph caught my eye:

"All these islands are beautiful, more beautiful than the Gardens of Valencia in the month of March. They are very beautiful, and distinguished by a diversity of scenery filled with a great variety of trees of immense height blossoming and all flourishing in the greatest perfection, various birds singing in countless numbers, extensive fields and meadows, different kinds of honey, mountains of very great size and beauty, groves and fruitful fields admirably adapted to tillage, pasture and habitation."

For the external account, one of our most important requirements is to judge how far our performance is due to our own actions as distinct from accidents or measures taken by the rest of the world. Once we're monitoring domestic (residentiary) production and supply, as proposed here, the next best indicator is the income terms of trade, to be calculated almost certainly with a lag-on grounds of the difficulty in collecting primary data early enough. By the income terms of trade we mean, of course, the index of change in our capacity to import, given the quantity of goods we export and the change in the price of our imports relative to that of our exports.

This is information we can scarcely afford not to have. However, especially when the export-specialised, natural resource economy is in rapid expansion mode, there seems to be a case for computing separate indices for inshore and offshore. This acknowledges that the one sector typically earns a superabundant capacity to import; while the other has mostly to rely on what portion of that fruit it is able to harvest.

Indeed, the whole accounting exercise could benefit from two sets of calculations. For example, the scale of foreign direct investment is unlikely by far to be the same offshore as onshore. Ditto for export and capital markets with which the two sectors enjoy quite different relations. Here are two different worlds. We do at some point have to add them together to depict the economy whole; but we have to be clear as to what precisely we wish to find out about each.

This brings us to other indicators. The first is the movement in net forex reserves. We're boasting now that our present reserves exceed six months of import cover. Those reserves result from several elements. First is the balance on merchandise trade, the difference in value between goods we import and those we export. To arrive at the current account balance, we further take account of other day to day or current transactions, payments in addition to receipts. Finally, the overall balance of payments reckons with once for all or capital as well as day to day or current transactions

We end up with a net position which reflects a) ongoing payments and receipts on account of day-to-day economic activity and b) periodic borrowings and lendings. We arrive at a measure of whether we're doing better or doing worse, given our level of activity. That you can have higher net reserves at a lower or unchanged level, or lower net reserves at a higher level is an effective caveat against innocent bragging.

As with the fiscal balance, so with this balance of payments which yields the net addition to our reserves meaning our stored up capacity to spend on imports-and to meet other external obligations. Some of this net addition is due to current account production performance inshore, some due to the levels of product, income and taxes generated offshore. We need to have it translated into the coverage it represents not only of imports measured in months or weeks but also of probable clams on foreign exchange for either export or flight of capital-all in conditions where capital as well as current transactions are officially unblocked.

Especially during times of plenty, it might be useful to compute some "shadow" value of the real exchange rate ruling inshore, where the untransformed state of the economy and its forex earnings potential are cause for concern. Given the income terms of trade, that exchange rate inshore might be wholly impossible to sustain without copious injections from offshore.

The real value in local dollars of inshore exports could be quite an eye-opener. If the exchange rate were not subject to the distortions and idiosyncrasies of booming natural resources, we might more easily perceive how our long run future is linked to those of our inshore exporters capable of competing: practitioners of chutney, calypso and soca; pannists, other musicians, entertainers and carnival artists; sportsmen, artists, academics, and sundry providers of intellectual and other creative services.

It seems trite to state what seems so obvious. And yet these are areas where public investment spending is most capricious -including spending on formal education and school. Part of the curse of the hydrocarbons stems, of course, from bias on the part of the policy makers. An even greater part arises, however. from the systematic distortion that seems to justify the bias-due to our failure to separate exchange rates off and onshore. Investment in the panyard is a clear case where we may be grossly underestimating the possible returns and we need indicators to bring that and similar features into the open.

Many of the indicators referred here to may turn out to be gratuitous. Singly they sometimes add little. Nevertheless, the virtue of attending to them lies in the insights they bring-simply from being grouped together and from the corroboration they lend to one another. Besides, policy is attended by more penetrating insights than are yielded by the statistics we present simply out of habit.

So far as the monetary system is concerned, the indicators presented by the Central Bank Review and MPR are familiar and have served us well. The theme of the age is expansion fuelled by climbing oil tax revenues and underpinned by a liquidity regime now switching from the (statutory) reserve ratio to tools of management more market-based. The stance of the authorities is "accommodative".

A declining interest rate trend follows: the prime lending rate, the average discount rate on Treasury Bills, the mortgage lending rate. Credit expands in terms of lending by the consolidated financial system and borrowing by the consumer and corporate sectors. Stock market and mutual fund investments flourish. Only saving in the form of bank deposits show a contrary trend, reflecting at least in part a change in the form rather than the level of saving.

Undoubtedly a reassuring picture, wholly consonant i) with a Golden Age where money is easy; ii) with an excessively export specialised economy where other than core inflation, as here defined, takes the form of demand for foreign exchange to purchase imported supplies; and iii) with exchange rate stability, under a regime of "managed float". As suggested above, the conventional challenge to monetary management has been almost non-existent.

The rider lies with the fiscal balance, itself in large part determined by transfers made by Govt to Long Term Funds. The liquidity of the financial system is enhanced by the excess of govt spending over earnings from non-energy taxes (the "domestic Budget deficit"). At the same time, Central Bank liquidity is reduced by the extent to which funds are effectively sterilised. The issue is if foreign exchange is made available to the market in amounts that just avert pressure on prices.

In sum, core or non-tradable "food" inflation apart, stability depends on the relation between the sterilisation of excess revenue by Long Term Funds; the domestic Budget deficit; and the accommodative posture assumed by the monetary authorities in regard to market sales of foreign exchange.

What escapes attention here is the future beyond the huge revenue injections. The Bank should be mandated to have funds directed toward sectors that are autonomous and export-competitive, away from satellite activities likely to attract foreign exchange encumbrances and prone to require foreign exchange support on n enduring basis This implies the wider mandate we referred to earlier.

Financial and monetary management ought perhaps to assume more nearly equal places in the Bank's portfolio. Intermediaries that specialise in capital funding of private investment must come within its purview. One indicator that seems indispensable is the measure of credit consumed by autonomous sectors compared with satellites. The vital distinction is probably not between consumer and corporate lending or even between foreign and local investment.

Our attention has been devoted to the external account and the monetary system. In some ways, we've also encroached on the fiscal balance, scheduled for later. We'll come to it as the central feature of the Fund's latest Article IV Consultation Report. The main feature of those reports is precisely their misplaced emphasis on matters fiscal at the expense of more decisive aspects. We promise a thorough review.

What reforms can we do without?

Posted February 14th. 2004. Trinidad Express
By LLOYD BEST

By request the following column on constitution reform, which originally appeared in December 2002, is reproduced below by way of resuming the discussion and clearing the ground for fresh thought and perhaps even new initiative.

Nothing so illustrates our WI predicament as the debate we've been having about constitution reform. We've been at it for more than 30 years now; at least since the youth rebellion of the late 1960s first focused the requirement to re-constitute the colonial state. And yet, our gaze remains fixed on the Constitution as law and text and on all kinds of trite problems, solutions to which will make absolutely no difference - unless the root causes are identified and addressed.

This emphasis on side issues is eloquent. One thing it reveals, I find, is our almost complete innocence of political imperatives, though we do not realise it. Being oblivious of politics is one of the central features of Afro-Saxon culture. Neither in slave society nor in the 100 years following Emancipation was there any place for politics; the "civil service" ethos prevailed and those habits have endured.

Another pillar of Afro-Saxon culture is our addiction to formulas - reflecting the awe in which we hold all forms of authority, not least government, administration and management. The other face to this is the negative self-evaluation made compelling by the authoritarian order. The combination of slave and colonial society set quite rigorous conditions just for survival. We therefore had to invent and operate two very different worlds.

One was the wholly informal realm. Here we had to treat the regard we had for ourselves mostly as a "sleeping resource". The formal world was much more above ground. In this case, if we were to be active on our own account, self-denial could scarcely be escaped. This view of our history permits us to guess at the way things worked in the past the better to form and to fix the culture handed down to the present. We can more readily trace the origin of such habits as when we agree to "satisfy requirements" merely for a business purpose, even where our love interest, so to speak, is virtually non-existent.

We have the example of our attitude to schooling and to the attendant exams.

For scholarship purposes, students ritually gain foreign language distinctions but are fluent only in Obscene. By the same token, for three months every year, Trinidadians revel in parang and still manage not to know enough Spanish to say "I love you".

It seems that the whole of our existence is capsuled by a need to invoke formulas willy-nilly, as if there was no organic connection between the different materials we find ourselves working with. Ultimately the root difficulty with Afro-Saxon culture is that it provides little or no basis on which to perceive our society, our history and ourselves as some sort of integral whole.

It is this culture of discrete fragments which is responsible for the practice of gratuitous citation we're all so familiar with. This is the same culture which confuses the very real need for definition with the resort to prestigious dictionaries for the purpose. Educated West Indians simply do not see that dictionaries carry only such meanings as their authors are aware of. Societies such as ours, which are still largely unknown, even to ourselves, have therefore to devise a whole new family of words, concepts and meanings. They cannot be content to look things up - not if they are to come to grips with the facts of their own case.

This response is in no way driven by the ideology of nationalism. Quite the contrary, it is a universal requirement of the scientific approach. Where the concept of ethnicity is concerned for example, English dictionaries have been undertaking an almost indecent adaptation but their abiding confusion simply attests to the fact that English social thought is locked into Enlightenment and 19th century notions of class.

It has taken the huge migrations after WW II, from all ends of the pre-war Empire, to provoke a rude awakening to what precisely the cosmopolitan world of ethnicity is about - as TT would long have known, except for the fact that the educated elites have graduated from English imperial school.

It is in this confused cultural context that we've been almost blinded to constitution reform as a challenge - not simply or even mainly to amend laws on paper but to fashion a comprehensive re-constitution of a colonial and authoritarian social order and to displace it by one democratic, participatory and responsible. Over the last 30 years, the approach we have adopted instead has been akin to a mechanic bereft of any notion of the way that the social motor works. Hence we've been obsessed with bits and pieces, with one or the other of the starter, the distributor, the carburettor, the plugs, etc., instead of with the combustion process as a whole. And, "that good so" until the next breakdown.

Right up to the present campaign, we've been addressing matters in ways which are far from useless, and have indeed yielded important insights and thrown up information on perspectives brought to the interpretation by different categories of individual.

Some have focused on the strength of the Executive. Others have pointed to the weakness of the Legislature and to defective procedures in the operation of the two houses of parliament. Still others have underlined the vulnerabilities of the Judicature not to mention those who have emphasized the problems of the electoral system, including the agency responsible for the conduct of voting.

In still other quarters, attention has been drawn to anachronistic features of the Public Service. Some have argued for a premium on effective local government institutions, if citizen participation is to have any meaning. Related to this, others have advocated machinery to enhance citizen influence on critical areas of public policy. Besides, an increasing number of would-be reformers have become aware that party reform is pivotal so much is party or movement a reflection of the state of community and society.

However, the very large number that has still not made the link between political and party reconstruction, on the one hand, constitution reform and amendment to the Constitution, on the other, is a pledge of a collective failure. We have simply not realised that new dispensations for the individual parts, however well orchestrated, are almost certain to come to nought, if not explicitly designed for a fit into the larger scheme of reform.

It is tempting to think of this requirement as another example of setting pre-conditions and limits because of an apocalyptic outlook on change. This is an altogether valid consideration. There is always the risk that partial advances which are perfectly feasible might be foregone on the premise of all or nothing. However, in the nature of the post-colonial WI case, it would seem that the risk is quite the opposite. There do exist a few piece-meal reforms which, on their own, might be effective but this is not true of the great majority.

With such an undeveloped sense of community it is hard to see what local government means in Trinidad, if not Tobago. Without an effective cadre of representatives in Parliament, and without a Legislature or Parliament to discipline and instruct the Executive or Government, there is little chance that any requirements at all would be beyond systematic violation. Whether parliamentary procedure or electoral rules, Public Service regulations or public policy specifications, almost the indispensable condition for their successful application is a genuine parliament to defend and protect popular interests. In our current arrangement, it is not that the PM "has too much power"; it is that, effectively, we have always had a government without a parliament - except in name - so that the culture of Doctor Politics and maximum leadership can only have flourished.

The link is most manifest in the case of the Ombudsman who, without parliament, is naked. The main issue in constitutional change lies therefore with what reforms, both in government or politics, we simply cannot do without; and by what ways and means we must go about securing them, as absolutely the first priority?

-Continued next week

Role and function of the academy

Posted January 24th. 2004. Trinidad Express
By LLOYD BEST

One reason cultures find it hard to break from themselves is that even members of the academic and intellectual community harbour gratuitous inhibitions, on purely human grounds, even though the latter are incompatible with their trade. Candour is our business. It is only where the general culture is as low as it is in T&T-and there is scarcely a critical tradition-that it is routinely confused with mischief. Especially when we're ourselves involved, we must say clearly and equivocally what we've concluded.

Fresh insights and new knowledge always risk upsetting and disturbing, irrespective of intention or method. Examples are legion. Many cite the treatment of Galileo by the Curia of the Roman Church (1633); those better informed cite Giordano Bruno, burnt at the stake (1600). Of course, we do not specially seek to offend; but a university is not a political party, where the objective is mobilisation and the method is to appeal to the loyal. Even on campus, I don't suppose you can prevent popes from emerging; but a university is not a Church either. Its purpose is not faith, doctrine or obedience; it is science. A University is far from a Trades Union of which the stock in trade is agitation before negotiation. It does not function like the Army or the Police where the keys to efficiency are authority and strict discipline. Nor does the Academy approximate the diplomatic corps either, where hypocrisy, protocol and intrigue are indispensable to normal operations, often in the midst of actual hostilities.

The University is an Estate of its own kind. Irreverence is its business.

The world of intellect is one of contestation, combat and competition, over the validity of ideas of course, meaning information and knowledge. The reason for being is, to the extent possible, to create conditions for reason as distinct from ruse, dissimulation, trickery or conconsah, let alone brute force, physical confrontation or war. In a society where we're all mostly fearful of saying what we think or of revealing what we know; it is hard to believe; but the nearest siblings to the university are the communications media. At least in principle, journalists justify privileged access by their duty to get at the facts and to let the country find out. There can be no question of protecting sensitivities or steering clear of humiliation and hurt.

It is not that tact, compassion, generosity and grace are immaterial. Civilised behaviour does dictate that we walk lightly and with due concern for our fellows. That should go without saying.

The issue is one of professional precedence and priority. If the imperative for the university cadre is to state positions as lucidly and unreservedly as possible, the corollary is due regard for doubt about sources, for limitations of method, for margins of error and for the essential provisionality of even the firmest conclusion. These caveats do not however relieve us of the responsibility of trying to establish the comparative validity of competing truths. All truth is provisional and is only for the moment acceptable as our most worthy description of reality. And yet it is distinct from hallucination, figment, illusion, delusion or dream.

It is this mandate that separates academic and intellectual from diplomat, politician and priest.

In my experience, the latter invariably feel bound to begin their disquisitions with the solemn declaration "in all humility." That always makes me wary. I'm never quite sure. For them, it all depends. It is eminently reasonable that the political leadership have its eye on consensus and solidarity so as to get things done. Even in the university we have to make space for that way. For the purposes of intellectual life, however, it is mostly humbug.

This recognises an old and unavoidable tension within the academy. This tension used to surface as conflict over the suitability for headships and deanships of the most distinguished and revered academics and intellectuals. Often the question was whether the senior professor should automatically be department head. Of course, simply being a philosopher, thinker or academic is not necessarily at odds with being an effective political leader or efficient administrator.

Nor is it that political leaders and adminstrators within the university might not also be capable of-or even engaged in-scholarly or intellectual work.

The issue here is not one of distributing patronage or of assigning status and rank; it is one of respecting professional specialisation and related imperatives. Because of funding requirements, of involvement by Business and Government and of engagement with the public, intellectual life increasingly demands one way of proceeding while political and administrative leadership dictates quite another. In the case of St Augustine, Emeritus Professor John Spence has queried the virtue of a Pro-Vice Chancellor and Principal serving as automatic Chairman of the Appointments Committee and Selection Board. This issue is not going to go away. It raises fundamental issues, characteristically never discussed in the open, where it would have to be driven by reason and not be relegated to the sussurus of gossip and mauvaise langue for which the half-made society is famous.

I'm lucky to have been operating from what is in effect a small private university built up over the years. I can speak without let, hindrance or circumscription. In a previous column, I pointed to what seemed to me the exceptional merits of the current Campus Head as administrative and political leader. More than one person told me "I see you tap up your Tapia friend Bhoe;" this is a pathological place. I'd said that the Principal was neither scholar nor academic, something I thought I had freedom to say and needed to make explicit, not only because the two of us had once shared the same political stable but, more importantly, because such a definition relieves Dr Tewarie of burdens he is clearly hard put to carry.

To lead the scholarly community requires an intellectual and therefore moral authority that a capable man, such as he is, has in principle every chance of acquiring. But he came to the university from outside and graduated to the top job through an appointment necessarily supported by government and politics. Second, the task of running the campus is not nowadays compatible with the intellectual life. Such a tension can be managed only if brought into the open for the public, including the university community, to know what the issues are. No surprise that my comments in the first instance disturbed; but I cannot see how they can be thought unwarranted.

At the recent Critical Thinking Conference, they even prompted a reference from my esteemed colleague, Steve Ouditt, of the Creative Arts Centre. After that encounter, I feel able to say now that options are much clearer. One participant asked for a comment on ideas George Lamming had expressed concerning the intellectual and critical tradition. Quite rightly, Dr Tewarie sidestepped the query, implying that he had no interest in pronouncing "who was educated or who was an intellectual." I fail to see how the Principal did not know he was in effect conceding the division of labour. Otherwise he could scarcely have chanced any such remark. Our academic leader is not only required to define the attributes of university and academic cadre, he cannot escape doing it in public.There does exist an ethos that differentiates the intellectual, educated and responsible elites. It specifies what the mission is and the entire country must be made aware. It is in no way a matter not of standing or hierarchy but one of specialised occupation and professional responsibility. The question might be asked if it is not UWI's failure to discern and define the requirement which lies at the origin of our present predicament.

The matter is all the more pressing in the light of initiatives just taken to turn the Academy around. I cannot say I appreciated the tendencies towards incantation and cultism at large in the Conference on so-called "Critical Thinking." I said so openly. Nor did I think wise the apocalyptic approach of heaping resources on one single event. I am also not sure that with so many gratuitous visitors we did not risk re-inforcing our proclivity for seeking received wisdom for largely its own sake. I was certainly disappointed by the orientation of comments addressed to the panels.

And yet I feel that the Principal is to be commended for determined efforts to make something of a fresh start. I think him entitled to our fullest support. Such support is not to be confused with blind loyalty, least of all if it ends up being lopsided and polarised, on whatever ground.

I have in mind persons, on and off campus, prepared to make realistic estimates of both necessary and possible committed to speaking frankly. My own commitment is in no way negotiable.

At the Conference, I expressed profound doubts about the sequel-precisely because the scale and the reach of the effort and the already undiscriminating claims of success are precisely what could compromise the future-if they provoked the usual flood of mindless opportunism.

The only way I know to face the attendant dangers is to continue subscribing to the values of academe.