Positioning a New Vanguard

24, Apr 2000
In our last column we juxtaposed the differing levels of consciousness that demarcate and inform the two communities that comprise the majority support base of the PNM and the UNC. We established the core progressive values that guided the PNM in its early formation as a vanguard nationalist party and later as party in governance and insisted that the task of all "vanguards" is to work "towards their own demise and their reconstituting at a higher level".

We ended by suggesting that the present task for the PNM is to assign itself an altogether new vision to suit the times just as the onus is on the UNC regime in power to "discover within itself and extrapolate out of the Indian experience, both locally and internationally, a core of progressive values as the PNM did for its support base in '55 and '56". If the UNC fails to achieve this then it shall in no way assume for itself any significant historic mission. We shall see what happens.

As regards the PNM, information has reached us that it is seeking a new vision but has started out with an entirely wrong approach.

One would expect that an organisation with such a wealth of practical experience of governance would want at each stage in its analyses to indicate what has been accomplished over the 35 years of its incumbency, what presently obtains, what are the present problems and shortcomings arising out of what it did, and what needs to be done now to actualise the new vision for the 21st century.

For example, how on God's earth can the PNM deal with the issue of "education" and do not at least make some attempt to revisit what has been done in terms of the vast expansion of educational facilities, both in terms of structures and curricula, to meet the demands of free education to all and sundry? Or not attempt to assess the ramifications of the Concordant and the role of this alliance between State and denominational bodies in the process and in context of the deep problems plaguing the system today as a result of what was instituted?

Why, for instance, have the senior secondary comprehensives failed to placed tech-voc on equal footing with grammar school academia and so provide for us the critical mass of technical cadres and work force so essential for our modern industrial development? In other words the very curricula and systems beg for review in context of our present and future development plans.

The point is that the revisiting of such issues are crucial to our nation-building process and this reviewing must be a constant, ongoing feature of any daily management exercise.

Instead we understand that the approach the PNM intends to utilise involves the listing of a series of platitudes and universal truisms about the importance of the "humanities in the global age", about involving the communities in the educational process and in the exercise of improving teaching standards, and about the significance of information technology in today's world.

All well and good, but with such an approach crucial connections will not be made and people will not see themselves and their development in the movement from one stage to another in the educational process.

Similarly with "agriculture": one understands that the nation shall be regaled about "fully automated farming" and the "introduction of new techniques and new crops" but not one word about sugar and Caroni Ltd.

Approximately 75 per cent of all our agricultural activity revolves around planting sugar cane, harvesting sugar cane and processing sugar, and Caroni Ltd controls almost 60 per cent of all our flat arable land. Land use is crucial to any social transformation here.

The society as a whole must be engaged by any serious vanguard in a detailed land reform programme. The violence presently taking place in Zimbabwe is a good case in point when vanguards and progressive people ignore the fact that land is the basis of all initial wealth generation.

Presently, we produce sugar at a cost that is globally uncompetitive, and most years we are unable to meet our quotas as specified by the US Sugar Act and the International Sugar Agreement (ISA), the two principal legal frameworks that decide the distribution of sugar on the global market.

Not surprisingly, the present UNC regime has continued to bankroll Caroni Ltd to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Caroni Ltd is just another elaborate dole or welfare system as is the URP, the one rural based and the other urban.

PNM must be made to understand that there can be no policy on agriculture in T&T that does not propose a new arrangement for the sugar industry and its anachronistic plantation system.

It is only in context of a total transformation of the industry and a new arrangement for Caroni Ltd that one can comprehend the vision of "automated farming" and the introduction of "new crops".

And equally important is the resuscitation of old crops such as cocoa with the application of new readily available technology. Remember that we, T&T, are still known for the best flavouring cocoa in the world.

Again as with "education", the approach that is to be used by the PNM in discussing "agriculture" will not make the required connections and the fundamental relationships that exist in this economic sector will not be considered, far less be reviewed analytically.

With regard to Tobago, we understand that the situation is even worse. There is no perspective, no analysis of the reality. In fact we understand that there is almost a conscious abnegation of the reality.

Politically at the moment there is no issue facing the unitary State of T&T more complex, more sensitive and "hotter" than the issue of the relationship between the sister islands.

Tobago has seized the time and allowed its best sons and daughters of the soil to develop a comprehensive developmental plan for Tobago. Nothing initiated at central government level can compare.

Yet we understand that the PNM in seeking to position T&T for the global age, which limits its concerns to merely restating PNM's "commitment to the continued development of Tobago to satisfy the aspirations of Tobagonians" and PNM's continued intent "to advance the maximum decentralisation of public authority consonant with unitary statehood and national standards of public accountability".

In addition, we understand that the PNM advocates the establishment in Tobago of a "duty-free port", a tech-voc school, and Institutes of Tourism and Agriculture, and the use in the health sector of "tele-medicine" through electronic linkage between Tobago and the Mount Hope Hospital.

Tobagonians have their plan. They have already charted the course of their destiny. What they are demanding is the reform of the very fundamental tenets of the constituted relationship between the THA and the central government of T&T, particularly in regard to financial procedures.

But all this is to be ignored by the "new PNM" while they talk about free port, tech-voc schools and institutes which in themselves are neither here nor there and of no great import in context of the destiny Tobago has already charted.

It would seem as though the rationale and purpose behind this PNM approach is to be "cute" and "play it safe", kiss babies and regain state power without committing the party to any clearcut formulations or any fundamentally new vision despite the repeating, ad nauseam, of the buzz words, "global age".

If by such an approach the PNM hopes not to ever deal with the fundamental relationships between people and people and between people and structures, at all levels, then its activities, absolutely and totally, shall be devoid of politics. And that is indeed a frightening proposition for the coming months.