On March 20 last, Dr Terrence Farrell delivered an address to the Trinidad and Tobago Transparency Institute in which he blamed our woes of corruption on failed elites and broken institutions. While much of the address seemed to engage in some finger pointing and an element of self-confession, he still seemed to miss the mark on the real source of our problems as a society.
As a multi-cultural, multi-religious society, one must be able to understand that the establishment of the independent state in 1962 brought with it the domination of a particular world view that was founded upon Western Christian values. Any other value system was deemed to be inferior and the problems were not about race, but rather about class.
The society of the 1960s and 1970s was one in which political patronage and political support had considerable overlaps. Those who opposed the regime of the day were locked out of a system that did not qualify to be called democratic until 1991, when the PNM returned to power after losing in 1986.
The political scientist Samuel Huntington has offered the discipline of political science “the two turnover rule” as a means of measuring whether or not developing societies have become functioning democracies or not. Our challenges really started in the 1990s when a different political value system was unleashed through a properly functioning two-party system in which one party was no longer dominant.
The viciousness of the political contest ever since we arrived at democratic status in the 1990s has turned both race and class into high-powered engines of our democracy. Engaging political change that would bring with it rural value systems that were not consonant with those of the urban elites provided a fundamental societal challenge that threatened to open the doors of power and polite society to persons whose background and upbringing did not match those who were accustomed to being dominant.
The Express newspaper had a famous headline that cursed the NAR government of ANR Robinson for what they called The Indianisation of the Government. Many viewed it as a racial attack instead of realising that it was coded class warfare that was about to be unleashed through the challenging of opportunities for persons who lived outside of the protected urban elite network. Rectifying an imbalance to bring equality created a scare.
The split in the NAR administration opened the door to the formation of a genuine two-party system that had its own urban-rural dichotomy, but the pendulum now swings on the basis of a cadre of independent voters who no longer buy into one value system over another. That is a clear and present danger to the domination of the urban elites whose social class networks are no longer as dominant as they once were.
This debate has gone way beyond the issue of “failed institutions” and “failed elites.” This has to do with an appreciation of our diversity and the need to genuinely recognise and accept that diversity instead of trying to assert the hegemonic dominance of one group in society over all others. The establishment of the independent state of T&T came out of the failure of the federation to survive the vote in favour of secession by Jamaica.
If there are broken institutions today it is not because they emerged out of any process of evolution, but rather because they were installed at independence on a “cut and paste” basis from constitutions drafted by the colonial authorities for former colonies in other parts of the British Empire. Our constitution came through negotiations among political elites and never rose from any united struggle of our people.
The PNM-UNC battles of the last two decades have been analysed as race and tribal wars by many. They clearly have misunderstood the evolving voting behaviour statistics for 1981, 1986, 1991, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007 and 2010 that debunk race and tribal theory. People’s voting behaviour does not mean that they are racist. That does not explain Tobago and ANR Robinson, the ONR and 1981, the NAR of 1986, the UNC of 1995 and 2000, the COP of 2007 and the PP of 2010.
Our problems exist today because our urban elites are unable to tolerate the presence of rural political elites in their midst offering different policy prescriptions that do not suit their value systems. A good example of this is the unrelenting struggle by urban elites and their allies to prevent the Debe to Mon Desir section of the Point Fortin highway being built, likewise the unfortunate remarks that have been made about the building of a UWI campus in Debe.
Our traditional urban elites are really in the fight of their lives as the society continues to change. Blaming broken institutions that have no historical connection to the people for corruption and the failures of social elites misses the mark as it distracts from the reality that those elites are in the midst of redefining how to maintain their dominance in the face of the political rise of value systems that are alien to them.