Our migrant footnote

‘Tis not the season for too much good sense or rigorous vigilance to prevail. For, elections here tend to be the stuff of comedic farce and the absurd. Such was the counsel of those older and wiser than I following the last column when I urged consideration of the true value of municipal governance in the midst of campaigning for local government elections.

So, when I received the latest release from the Organisation of American States (OAS) regarding a June 23 Declaration for the Protection and Integration of Migrant and Refugee Children in the Americas, I knew I had to pay close attention to it, since few others currently commanding even the smallest share of public space would be inclined to so do.

Bear in mind, and to its credit, our Ministry of Foreign and Caricom Affairs is now among the more prolific producers of timely press dispatches from the government system.

This has not always been the case. As a close observer in this particular area of national concern, I can tell you that there were times when opportunities to remain silent were, as matters of policy and practice, never shunned.

The current period is thus not marked by the kind of opacity that became the norm not very long ago. During those bleak days, this told many of us that an official environment existed in which foreign policy is not deemed as important to maintaining a high level of political preference.

I therefore checked to see whether the June Declaration had at any time occupied space at the public information mill over at foreign affairs. For, the main political combatants and their shadowy surrogates would have been hopeless, futile sources – however intriguing the Declaration under current circumstances.

These were people, you see, who had led the “close de borders” crew and had not winced at the thought of kicking the bows back into dark, rough ocean waters with women and small children on board.

Then belatedly to conclude that these were people, after all, including children who need to be in school. Girls who need to be respected. Little people who need to be meaningfully integrated into society so they can contribute to national life.

Some of this makes me recall the time the late prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, James Mitchell, snapped when I questioned the absence of foreign policy as a manifesto objective during the course of an election (which he lost): “Foreign policy never won anyone an election,” he said.

As a consequence, I suppose, what I consider to have been an interesting intervention by this country at the 53rd Regular Session of the OAS, had eluded even minister Browne’s media engine room.

Read the declaration and you would note three important country provisos to declared hemispheric obligations regarding the rights of migrant children.

The US had technical issues with a provision related to “the right to identity” and the Dominican Republic indicated that it is not a signatory to agreements mentioned in the declaration.

The most significant for us, is T&T’s “footnote” which qualified T&T’s commitment only to the extent that the rights in question are “recognised in international agreements to which we are signatories and in accordance with our national legislation.”

In other words, we plan to comply only if there is a coercive obligation. UWI experts, do I have that right?

Then, just days later on July 4, Justice Frank Seepersad ruled, in summary, that the 1951 Refugee Convention does not apply in our instance due to the absence of relevant domestic legislation.

What does all of this mean in the current context? For one, bipartisan parliamentary action can ensure that July 4 and June 23 do not collide to cause harm to the most vulnerable in our midst – children.

School places alone do not meet the minimum standards set by the June 23 declaration. I have witnessed the unseemly, obscene scramble for credit on this question.

It is time that signatures on international conventions and declarations and handshaking photo-ops give way to more detailed explanations of what these things really mean.

Had this been the case, electorates would have more competently judged our country’s performance as a regional, hemispheric, and global partner.

For instance, had anyone been paying attention, there would have been sharp repudiation of hypocrisy on questions related to the Caribbean Court of Justice, the nature of the Caricom Single Market, and the various options under conditions of open regionalism.

Venezuela and Haiti would not have come as tragic surprises, and the absence of law would not have been an excuse for breaking high-profile, photographed, and press released promises. These things need to begin delivering political damage.

 

Election agendas in T&T

There are few areas of public governance that have been the subject of as many studies, consultations, speeches, and White Papers as the reforming of our system of local government. Yet, local government election campaigns are about the worst possible time to label prospective reform issues as central to their eventual outcomes.

For one, the kind of change needed to regulate better quality representation and service delivery is not the prerogative of councillors and aldermen in a municipal corporation. This is a process suited to enlightened parliamentary decision-making, and faithfully compliant executive action.

Once elected, local government representatives will be responsible for implementing whichever reforms are eventually enacted, but they are not the ones to determine the legislative conditions under which they are to perform.

Secondly, the least of the apostles at local government election time are usually the actual candidates who routinely receive third or fourth or fifth-class billing on the hustings.

It should not inspire anyone that being a local government representative provides a stepping stone to a parliamentary career, when in fact it is a substantially important job that has meaning for people and their communities.

In the process, community needs and ways of managing them, are rarely at the top of the main campaign agendas, and it has become reliant on some kind of “reform” to accord local representatives their appropriate place in the scheme of things.

At this time, even the partisan huddles at cottage and home meetings focus on strategies to win, and not necessarily to work out ways of resolving community challenges.

Instead, the advent of messaging apps has played such a role, during terms of office, and helped stimulate joint deliberation and action on immediate needs, almost in defiance of the formal systems for addressing them.

Virtual “local government”, via WhatsApp in particular, has thus latterly represented an alternative platform (at least at the primary level of discourse) to the research and solution-finding functions of statutory meetings. I am really not sure where village councils stand in this regard.

Another reason why local government reform is such a remote (or even irrelevant) matter for consideration at this time, is that these contests have traditionally been reduced to statistical indicators of the future prospects for political parties at general elections. August 14 is no different.

Current campaign shenanigans are dominant in the public discourse, and who aligns with whom is currently deemed infinitely more important than accumulated water puddles in the drainage system that will soon yield the next dengue outbreak.

I suspect that the more devoted representatives agonise constantly over the manner in which their sponsor political organisations organise these campaigns. Some of the most committed, competent and conscientious politicians I have ever met have been local government representatives – on different sides of the political fence.

Many of them would tell you that when it comes to solution-finding and the allocation of frequently scarce resources, there is a level of mature bipartisanship that kicks in. This is particularly true around times of crisis and emergency.

You can also usually tell the difference between parliamentarians who have served in local government and those who have not – not that this represents any kind of upward mobilisation, for they all serve national interests however communally sub-divided. But there always appears to be greater sensitivity to the micro-issues.

They eventually learn, you see, that the real action resides in the delivery of goods and services at street, block, and community levels. Efficient public health and waste management, community safety and security, spatial planning and development, and community infrastructure and services - all things of value that exceed almost everything else in national governance.

What a reformed system can do is to ensure that these matters are attended to with a higher level of orderliness, transparency, and efficiency, through the wider availability of resources and planning systems to ensure prompt and reliable delivery.

In a sense, that’s all we need. But the outcome of these current elections can change none of that. August 15 will find us in the same legislative space.

But none of this is to dismiss the need for comprehensive reform of the system of local government. There have been numerous iterations that have largely received bipartisan support. It is really hard to distinguish between what Suruj Rambachan and Hazel Manning and Franklin Khan advocated so strongly for. In principle, their proposals were the same.

But that’s not what these elections are all about. Local government reform could not have been more irrelevant at a time of local government elections.