Ministerial Selection
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By: Tony Fraser
Appointing persons to ministerial positions based on ethnic kinship, party affiliation, religious belief, nepotism and having persons strategically placed inside the cabinet who have associations with political party investors and campaign organisers have governed the political, ministerial cabinet culture in the post-Independence period.
More than a dozen ministers over a four-year period have been relocated, transferred to other portfolios, given sinecures at embassies abroad and no fewer than four of those have been fired in disgrace from the cabinet.
For years, the now integrity-driven Prime Minister, harboured and defended minister Jack Warner in her cabinet, giving him positions of even great responsibility and trust, while international organisations, the U.K. and the USA, a Fifa tribunal and the international Court for Sport Arbitration wanted him to answer questions regarding hundreds of millions of dollars in corruption: our dear clean-handed prime minister once said she knew nothing of the operations of Fifa; Warner had a clean record at home.
Today, another half dozen ministers remain in office because they fit into the categories
This seriously flawed process of cabinet selection and governance has left Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar with little choice but to seek to baptize her actions against Ramadharsingh and Sharma as being driven by “my commitment to maintaining the high ideals upon which we were elected. I am not swayed by any other consideration other than that which is right and honourable.”
However, informed and hard-thinking opinion reflected immediately on the action taken by the PM and concluded that her action had far more to do with the fact of having to face the polls in the next 12 months, remembering that she and her party/ies lost four elections in 2013 and are in desperate need of an issue upon which to hang her campaign.
The fact is that there is neither constitutionally stipulated criteria or a practice through which candidates with expertise and integrity for ministerial office are selected and a process through which they must past before they could take on the responsibility for managing billion-dollar ministries.
Indeed, then Prime Minister Patrick Manning outlined his methodology for selecting ministers: individuals did not require any particular skills but rather “a level head and common sense”. On that basis he selected a hotelier to be his minister of national security.
Successful countries in the industrial and developing world pay more attention to quality and equity. In Singapore for instance, notwithstanding being a highly centralised political culture based on an elitist political hierarchy, the country is administered by bureaucrats based on merit and capacity for the job and not by those selected for political affiliation and the other non-essential characteristics.
Like T&T Singapore is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society; but unlike this country the giving of fair treatment to all races in education, housing and health is considered to be vital for the coherence of society. So too are there requirements for equal opportunity in Parliament and the sharing of economic benefits and opportunities across the political spectrum; in “sweet T&T”, the culture of “winner take all” persists so parties take turns to proclaim “is we time now”.
In the United States, the President cannot appoint state representatives as secretaries, but is forced to seek expertise and integrity from outside elected politicians and even so, such persons have to be subjected to a rigorous examination by the Senate which can endorse or reject them notwithstanding they having been selected by the President.
One of the less self-serving recommendations of the Constitution Commission appointed by the government is the one which advocates that we move to the U.S. system of electing Members of Parliament to represent constituencies and allow the PM or Executive President to elect a cabinet based on expertise and integrity.
Without fully endorsing that particular recommendation as stipulated by the Commission, it has the potential for allowing the best of two possibilities to take root: hard-working community and people- oriented representatives can be elected to look after the affairs of their constituents; while a conscientious leader can find the expertise, integrity and take into consideration ethnic equity in the fashioning of a cabinet.
We just can’t go on this way … please deliver us someday, Explainer.
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