Dr Winford James
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Schisms In Robinson's House

January 09, 2003
by Dr Winford James


A mere six years after ANR Robinson both won the Tobago House of Assembly for the Tobago NAR and took the presidency of Trinidad and Tobago, the party is now a faint shadow of its former self and could not win an election if one were called this year. Seriously weakened over the period by defections to a resurgent PNM, Deborah Moore-Miggins' breakaway PEP, and Panday's rampaging UNC, the party has been further split down the middle, with one side retaining the name NAR and the other reverting to the name DAC. And so Robinson's house is now so badly divided we don't know if it is a house at all.

In reaction to a superficial and cosmetic PNM attention to the small and dispossessed, the house was built in the Black Power environment of the early 1970s, and was 'liveable' in 1976 when it wrested the two Tobago seats from the PNM. Its politics was based on Tobagonian nationalism against a heavily centralising and patronising politics of the PNM-run national government.

It was a politics that served its captain well, for it pushed Tobago and its comparative burdens and deprivations into the national limelight and kept them there, propelling Robinson into the roles of Parliamentary Spokesman for Tobago, Architect of Internal Self-government for Tobago, Chief Opposition Voice in the Establishment of the Tobago House of Assembly Act of 1980, First Chairman of the Restored Tobago House of Assembly, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Minister Extraordinaire in a UNC-dominated government, Architect of the Tobago House of Assembly Act of 1996, and President of Trinidad and Tobago. All these roles when, by his own admission, his constituency of Tobago East remained the most undeveloped and neglected in the country before he moved away from representational politics into the presidency.

It was a politics that Hochoy Charles, fourth Tobago House of Assembly Chairman/Chief Secretary, adopted, far more aggressively than all his predecessors, Robinson included, but which floundered on the rocks of an arrogance without formal substance and of perceptions of unprecedented corruption. Charles squandered the inheritance in four short years at the helm while Robinson looked on from his presidential heights.

In Charles' truncated tenure as leader of the Tobago NAR, the party lost four consecutive elections and, in the process, significant parts of its popular support to the PNM, the UNC, the PEP, and the fence. Crucially, it lost many of its intelligentsia, who were few and far between to begin with in an island that routinely loses its talented sons and daughters to Trinidad, United States, Canada, United Kingdom, among other places. The latest expression of the party's decline is the resurrection of the DAC (Democratic Action Congress) by Charles himself, which in effect means that some supporters have sided with him, some have stayed with the bulk of the executive of the NAR, while others are inhabiting no man's land.

How did the party come to this sorry pass? There are always a multiplicity of reasons for developments like this, but the critical ones must certainly be an absence of workable and working structures, a reliance on the considerable persona of Robinson, and a reliance on the inconsiderable persona of Charles, all three inextricably intertwined.

The Tobago NAR was simply not a party, but a person in the guise of a party. That person was Robinson, the quintessential Tobagonian icon - a man who was large in the eyes of Tobago, Trinidad, the Caribbean region, and even further afield. He had been educated at Oxford, had successfully challenged Eric Williams, articulated the Tobagonian nationalist cause consistently and convincingly, succeeded Williams as the most experienced and respected politician in the country, became a respected international jurist. All these achievements and qualifications and more helped him to keep the party together. But they were not structure but cult. That became painfully evident when he fell out with Lennox Denoon, third Chairman/Chief Secretary, caused the party's pretence of structure to fail, and ran things his way via a steering committee up to the election which put Charles in the Chief Secretary's chair after a public anointing by him as the big baas.

The NAR tried to formalise a structure after the election but the structure never really worked, as Robinson's persona continued to suffuse the operation of the party and as Charles attempted to substitute his own (comparatively underaccomplished persona) in creative imitation. In the absence of a tested formal structure, Robinson's hold in absentia was bound to weaken and Charles' limited qualifications were bound to prove unequal to the task of keeping the party together. Indeed, those qualifications availed the party little in the four consecutive elections lost, as well as in the exodus of many of its leading lights.

It is clear that it is because Charles could not keep the party together by the sheer force of his persona that he has had recourse to the resurrection of the DAC, Robinson's pre-NAR party; the action is eloquently symbolic. Regulated by the politics of personality, he preferred to further weaken the NAR rather than opting to strengthen it by offering his resignation, risking a demotion from the political leadership, and staying in the party.

Blinded by self-importance and a traditional leadership style that is out of sync with increasingly enlightened times, he doesn't see that if the NAR has failed fully four consecutive times under his leadership, the resurrected DAC cannot but fail either.


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