The governments we want

First published in the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian on May 16, 2018

Having covered and observed Caribbean elections over several decades (and even participated in one 37 years ago as a Tapia candidate), I must say I have always wondered why so many political contestants are eventually proven to either be wholly incompetent or hopelessly dishonest and corrupt.

Don’t get me wrong. I will never suggest that there aren’t many honourable, decent and skillful people who offer themselves for political office … and win. In fact, I have often wondered what it would have been like to have brought some of our finest office-holders together under national unity administrations throughout the Caribbean to help fix our broken societies.

I would even risk the prima facie naïve suggestion that the best our political parties have had to offer over the years could have collectively head-off some of the mess we are now faced with.

But then, politics is all about the calibration of power dynamics. There need to be wholesome forces competing against each other to bring about a sense of balance and restraint against excesses – sometimes even when the contestation is illusory.

I suppose the social scientists would argue that this is the nature of so-called “western democratic values” and why totalitarian experiments have all failed – as indeed they have – because the political space required to pit ideas against each other is a requirement of societies that crave democracy and the freedom it portends.

Only last year, a paper written by Josh Halberstam, Richard Öhberg, Daniele Paserman, Mikael Persson, Martín Rossi and Juan Vargas for the US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) attempted to answer the question: Who becomes a politician?

You know, I can’t remember what led to the search that unearthed the paper, but what I found – albeit in an almost completely different context, since they used Sweden as the political laboratory – was that there are real questions Caribbean people need to seek answers to if we are to rise above chronically poor political performance.

For example. Can our democracies attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? The writers of the NBER paper point to economic models which suggest that “free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative advantage at entering political life.”

In T&T, we would perhaps call this the “eat-ah-food” phenomenon – otherwise unaccomplished individuals with no real skills or abilities to talk about, catapulted onto the national stage with huge assignments and responsibilities, and encouraged to play the part because of the perks of office. In the wrestling ring of politics, it could perhaps be identified as “a reverse Maslow.”

Then comes the assertion that if the better endowed (intellectually and financially) “validating” elites - to abuse Lloyd Best’s unavoidable expression - are selected on the basis of perceived competence and absence of the “eat-ah-food” complex, there is more likely than not to be unevenness in the actual representation of the population.

In our context, though, it is also conceivable that both the intellectually and financially well-endowed and positioned may prove to be entirely incompetent. In T&T and among our Caribbean neighbours there are enough examples of where this has turned out to be the case.

This is why though we may wish not to give expression to this conundrum constitutionally, there perhaps needs to be, in the fashioning of our political organisations, more studious examination of the process of political selection. Such a re-examination would consider the balancing of the concept of “broad” representation against the requirement to have the best human resources at the wheel.

One huge component of all of this, of course, is the requirement of greater political education - a task none of our current political organisations has been able to sustain and one the formal education system has failed to effectively deliver.

Because our political parties are mainly dedicated campaign outfits, there appears to be little will or ability to expand their functionality in this important area.

So, while we wait, we not only get the governments we deserve, we sometimes regretfully get the ones we want.

Urgent business

Take it from me. Post-election shenanigans, tribal conflict, internecine warfare, boastfulness, regret, grossly dishonest promises, jockeying for position and favour, and acts of shamelessly unveiled partisanship by clever pretenders will all eventually end or subside considerably.

Getting down to business, as we have learned over the years, is best realised sooner rather than later and such awareness has grown, albeit slowly, to become a part of our evolving political culture.

You see, there have been times when extreme urgency, following encroaching complacency, abruptly entered the picture to dampen overflowing, but fleeting exuberance.

In 1981, George Chambers declared the fete over and it was time to get back to work. Five years later, financial stringency entered the routine lexicon of governance forever. Through the years, declarations on the state of treasury holdings have accordingly become a mandatory feature of newness.

Today, urgency associated with national well-being has offered up fiscal menus associated with overdrafts, borrowings, raids on rainy-day savings, dampers on state and private spending, and the dreadful thought that there might be assets suitable for disposal.

“Fixing” denotes a now familiar refrain of disrepair – in our case chronic and systemic – and the stuff of joint enterprise. Yep, “all ah we”, suggesting serious challenges against hope. Because I pay close attention to our youth, I can tell you that hope is a quality in short, as opposed to abundant, supply.

It also provides little comfort that the embrace of new solutions to address a deficit in confidence has not been meaningfully prescribed. This space has harped on just one area of forsaken opportunity (and there are many) – the digital reality.

Our young people, as digital natives, have recognised the negligence. And this is not only about generative AI which is essentially a tool made available by the timeless, spaceless character of digital spaces, no more than the way hammers and screwdrivers are critical to activities at a construction site.

What is even more important is the proposed architecture and its relationship with lived and natural environments. There are real experts in this sort of thing who can extend the metaphor.

That T&T lags behind so many, of like developmental status, on this question suggests that the same urgency attached to diagnoses of poor economic conditions is not being assigned to key components of serious solutions.

We shall see, in due course, whether this point is being understood. For instance, it is built into the question of remote work (currently lost in puerile public discourse), together with concerns about things like the “ease of doing business” and the conduct of routine citizen transactions.

Mind you, there is messaging in this not only for state systems but in the way the private sector also does its business. True, personal experience does not the entire story tell, but poll friends and family and colleagues and listen for yourself.

We have simply not been getting this right. And I am concerned that there is a level of demotivation that’s happening among our young people born into the digital age. And they are protesting through withdrawal as they, and the tools they use, are presented as problems and not as solutions.

“How does it feel to be a problem” W.E.B. Du Bois once memorably asked.

I have contended here before that while the more seasoned folk ought to be there to provide context and memory, the drive to achieve “digital transformation” should be in the hands of the under-40s.

There are numerous indicators of success or failure in our five-year tranches, but I propose to maintain vigilance over this one. Yes, there are urgent, immediate needs that require rather rare, enlightened engagement, but I know that I am not alone in keeping an eye on this.

The last time I left this country, I was asked to complete a silly little form with an additional, forgotten field I wrote by hand, in crapaud foot, at the back. When I returned, there was no room on the other form for the full name of my country. I lost yet another pen to a fellow traveler, and half the flight forgot to sign the back of the same form for customs.

I once asked an officer what eventually happens to these forms. Yes, I’m done here. I gone oui.