Corridor rejects political farce

16 Oct, 2000
TODAY, people are demonstrating by their actions, they require a new way of doing things, settling "governance" or even inventing a new concept of it. It is really the task of leaders, if they are serious, to grasp fundamentally what people are articulating by their action. It is essential for leaders to recognise what people are moving towards if only, instinctively at first, to highlight what is on the horizon.

Highlighting the "new forms" in early stages will give them the fullness of new language. It is so important for leaders to be "divergent thinkers", who do not entrap their minds in set categories, or accept anything as "done deals" cast in stone.

All accepted formulations, assumptions and practices must be challenged. While the masses act and, in the course of their combativity, draw conclusions and formulate new ideas, leaders tend to go the other way.

They formulate ideas as weapons with which to launch activity. Whenever and wherever opposite streams meet harmoniously is when and where we discover fundamental social development and major points of departure from what obtained in the previous norm. In this context, existing conservative leaders and advisors have been found wanting, not the people. The people fight their way forward out of the morass.

Leaders tend to keep them bound to old ways and hardly anything changes. And even when leaders are thrown up who dare to do, and be different, like Walter (Guyana), Maurice (Grenada), Rosie (Dominica), they are either killed or kill themselves as they toss up against seemingly insurmountable odds intrinsically more mental, intellectual and spiritual than physical in nature. The Caribbean, English-speaking that is, has done poorly in recent times in terms of protecting and ensuring longevity for such progressive leaders. The few of them lasted only long enough to just hint at glorious potential. But what in this epoch have the masses of people demonstrated by their activity, that has led us to believe this election in T&T may very well be the last of its kind?

Politically, T&T today, began in 1970. It was the February social explosion that revealed the glaring, antagonistic contradictions of the decolonisation process and posed the demand for social transformation. The movement demanded the development of the people here be made the be-all and end-all of all political and economic activity, that we become our own centre and our own reason for being. The localisation of the banking and finance sector and the nationalisation of certain productive activities were some of the means to that end.

Not as "ends" in themselves, as they eventually became when the regime in power co-opted the demands of the people. However, the important consideration for this discussion revolves around the question of the social instruments used to wage the struggle for transformation in 1970.

The groups throughout the country, spearheaded by PIVOT on campus, coalesced themselves into an umbrella vanguard organisation called NJAC and established a People's Parliament in Woodford Square in the heart of the city. Key leaders of the NJAC have admitted the people themselves convened the Parliament in Woodford Square and then sent for them. It was a new way of doing things and a broadening of the democratic concept relative to political behaviour.

The 1970 social explosion petered out with the incarceration of the entire progressive leadership, and the then PNM adoption of the major demands for reform. But the new political behaviour that emerged was never given any recognition. The corridor has not been the same since that experience and that is why it is the bane of conservative, reactionary politics.

The majority of people therein, particularly the youth, do not even register to vote and they tell you openly that they wish to have nothing to do with nonsensical elections that bring only exchange instead of change. Typical corridor language and terminology!

In the same vein they tell you that the politicians "only understand to misunderstand." Such expressions were first heard on the corridor between 1970-76 and seems to have been passed on and further inculcated as elemental to the sub-culture therein.

What today is being described as apathy throughout urban areas is in fact much deeper than meets the eye. We need to look below the surface. That "apathy" largely signifies a rejection of the farce that is projected as "politics" and "democracy". It is no surprise the Panday regime is yet unable to call elections because, so far, they cannot get a positive reading of the marginal seats along the corridor.

Continued