Empowering the people

June 30, 2004

There is a solution to most of the problems with which we are now plagued but we are made blind by the particular way we have been conditioned to think and act.

It is this conditioning that has created and reinforces the "culture" from which Lloyd Best in particular suggests we should seek "to escape."

That "culture" is most debilitating in its political expressions and manifestations. Dennis Solomon, on the other hand, was wont to say that this society is "constipated," meaning that burning or fundamental issues are never resolved, that there is never any closure to the very central and spinal questions that continue to plague us.

And so it will be until we find a way to include rather than exclude the people as a whole from the processes of decision-making.

Two decades ago, if one were to advocate the empowering of people, one would have been labelled a "communist" and be socially ostracised. Not so today.

If you call today for the empowerment of the people, no one will disagree since "empowerment" has become internationally the most popular "buzz" word of the present times. No one will disagree precisely because the word "empowerment" has come to mean nothing.

If however one were to attempt to conceptualise and concretise what empowerment of the people should and must mean, all hell will break loose, all the fundamental barriers will crumble.

Empowerment of the whole people cannot be anything other than a radical transformation of all that now obtains and what to many is deemed sacrosanct.

Since Independence, we have been wielding a participatory democratic system. People participate mainly by means of representatives elected on the basis of full adult suffrage.

These representatives are coalesced within highly centralised political parties that contest each other every five years in accordance with the Constitution.

These parties are led by maximum leaders who exercise, within the party structures, unlimited power derived from their popularity in the stronghold of the base support.

The political acumen of such leaders is usually measured not by the correctness and vision of their policies and programmes but by their capacity to manipulate this popularity and translate this into votes to keep themselves and their party of representatives in power.

Hence the "who we go put?" syndrome rather than "what we go put?"

Escaping the culture requires that the masses of people themselves have to begin to come to the realisation that the very system of representation, the very core of their participatory democracy, has become a stumbling block to genuine democracy, ie government of the people, by the people and for the people.

If decades ago representative government was appropriate and fulfilling, it is now no longer so. Modern people quickly outgrow it.

Party politics and representative government, pigeon-holed as they are within the present constitutional framework, deter rather than extend and broaden democratic practice and democratic functioning.

Our theory of social development tells us that everything becomes in time its very opposite. That's the lesson.

Party politics in the late '40s, '50s and early '60s was an advancement to the heyday of the independents' who failed to create the unity and focus that were essential to mobilising the country against colonialism; party politics then served to broaden political activity and enhanced our democratic life in comparison with what existed before.

Times have since changed. We are today facing a whole new world with a whole new set of complex relationships involving questions of race, class, gender and socio-economics that were not as sharply defined in the anti-colonial struggles.

The party system as designed and managed is now too limited to embrace the new articulations and demonstrations from below. The logic must be to open-up constantly rather than limit in any way the democratic process.

To begin this, we must revisit the Constitution that is supposed to be the binding social contract between every man, woman and child within the boundaries and confines of this nation.

And the purpose must not be to tinker with the Constitution as some are suggesting and/or proposing to do by way of the legislature.

On the contrary, we should tear up that Constitution and throw it away for the purpose must be to deepen and extend the democratic processes, minimise "one-manism," as the Jamaicans say, and facilitate people exercising power in their assemblies where they live and where they work.

One recalls back in 1999, the Independent Tobago Senator, Dr Eastlyn Mckenzie, in addressing the Tobago branch of the Association of Village and Community Councils and the THA's Community Development Division, warned that "...if the village council movement and the affiliated groups-youth groups, women's groups, etc-were to ever die, we will soon have an autocracy in this country, we will have no democracy..."

In the meantime, villagers all over T&T are strongly voicing the view more and more that they will no longer vote for anyone who does not seek their interest and does not consult them on a continuous basis.

We will see what will emerge out of this budding but developing consciousness.