Giving the people power

October 10, 2001

The three UNC dissidents were told emphatically: "Join the PNM and live in the sky!" Reminds me of the underworld figure who fell out with Al Capone and sent "ole Al" the following threat: "When next I come to New York, be missing!" The suggestion being that the threatened should quickly acquire the propensity to become "ghosts" or face the violent, murderous wrath of common thuggery. I really hope it does not ever come to that.

I once had the unfortunate but memorable task of visiting Trevor Sudama at hospital to occasion pictorial evidence of the brutality that was meted out to him by certain elements in the sugar belt.

Sudama had been a central active member of a new formation, SPIWTU (Sugar Plantation and Industrial Workers Trade Union), in opposition to the All Trinidad Sugar Estates and Factories Workers Trade Union led then by powerful personalities who frowned on attempts by this new formation to gain formal recognition to represent sugar workers.

Trevor Sudama was set upon and beaten almost to death with what was described as "two-by-four pitchpine planks of wood with six-inch 'tata-mash' nails".

Those pictures were splashed across the front page of the newspaper that I then edited. Involvement with the group that produced that newspaper took me at least twice a week into the sugar belt from Orange Grove to Usine Ste Madeleine and put me in contact with lots of people, other than Sudama, many of whom are now gone.

I can recall stalwarts like Sammy Gowandan of Dow Village, "Manny" Alexander and Deo from Balmain, Nazir Allarakoo of Golaconda, Hamlet and his group from Petit Morne, Harry Ramoutar of Brechin Castle, and Loutoo and Mohammed of the Sugar Workers Action Committee on the McBean side.

There was this tremendous support on the ground for a new progressive thrust in the sugar belt but the backward trade union hierarchy sought to make things difficult, if not outright dangerous, for the progressives. Some of the earlier mentioned people had worked out plans to seize and occupy the offices of the union.

In fact a dry-run, led by some heroic women plantation workers of Golaconda, was actually implemented successfully without the All Trinidad Trade Union bureaucrats ever having the foggiest.

Nervous in the heat of the politics of the situation and worried about the possibility that the planned move may be deemed extra-legal, they decided to seek legal opinion. The lawyer they approached was Basdeo Panday, a most obvious choice given his background, and the rest is now history.

What I am saying here is what I know not what I read or what I was told. Panday embraced the process with messianic zeal and with the thrust from the masses below marched the sugar belt into the mix and mainstream of T&T's modern politics, never ever to be turned back. Sudama, though, almost paid the price for this progress with his life.

The question is: Will he ever have to pay so dearly once again? Sudama certainly cannot be considered to be a charismatic personality, in fact he is rather dull and dour, but is no less committed to the sugar-belt cause than anyone else.

In the past, from 1965-76, the quest for national unity was predicated on trade union consciousness and socialist rhetoric, and when all the attempts in this period to achieve political power failed and the so-called economic boom ensued, all and sundry fell back to a racial strategy.

Once again the objective situation is demanding a move away from racial strategies. The balance of forces indicates that political power can neither be achieved nor maintained without a minimising or significant reduction of the racial divide. Once again everyone is for unity, the popular term is "inclusion", of course minus the trade union consciousness and passé socialist rhetoric.

What is disturbing though is that in the presently ensuing debate most people tend to be responding to emotionalism and pique and the issues are blurred and not rooted to the day-to-day affairs of people's existence. It is as if we all have already found the secrets to living in the sky.

Take for instance the question of Clico's role in the present situation. Everyone today is for "inclusion" so to say that anti-Clico criticism is tantamount to demanding "exclusion" is in fact obfuscation. In this modern world government's relationship with corporations is a given reality, even more so as the CL Financial Group is a homegrown entity now seeking to extend itself outward into the global scenario and needs support from its base country.

The question to be posed therefore is what is the nature of the relationship, how can transparency be ensured and, given the fact that Clico's base activity is life insurance, whether or not the regulations that guide the treatment of mutual funds are being compromised? If the issue is posed like that then it can be resolved by rational, intelligent people.

We need to remind ourselves that human beings did not form societies to lessen but to increase their individual possibilities, as Tom Paine insisted. The only fundamental reality is the struggle to continuously broaden the power of the people as a collective force.

All the so-called leaders and their bands of fawning "imps" claim that they only wish to serve the people and in their haste "to serve", nobody takes time to contemplate the ideals of humanity and the changes in the Constitution of the country required to facilitate in a structural way, the foremost ideal, which is power to the people to the very last person.

The Constitution apparently is sancrosant. Matters not how far the actual politics on the ground have stretched the parameters of existing legal arrangements. We need to uphold at all times the higher law, which is the spirit of natural justice.

Once Constitution stands in the way of natural justice then it must be rooted out and changed with vigorous expediency. At the moment that is exactly what should be done with the present Constitution of T&T. But how and by whom is the train to be set in motion?

That takes us to the question of "parties". Parties are not "ends" in themselves, but rather they are "means" to an "end". The party is a strategy of utilising a structured minority to capture political power in order to implement policies and programmes that will serve to bring social and economic development to the society as a whole.

The party is not paramount, what is paramount is the collective will of the people and the constant expanding of their democratic way of life to the point where "parties" themselves become obsolete. There will always be struggle between various parties and even internecine conflict between leading individuals of the same party.

What is crucial though in this context is that the issues are not personalised but kept on a clear objective level and that there be clear-cut avenues through which the people can intervene to bring their collective wisdom to bear on the resolving of matters. To accomplish this no one must fear the human clamour of the masses below and no one must be allowed or be forced to live in the sky.