The late Lloyd Best, one of the pre-eminent political economists and one of the most original thinkers of the post-independence, English-speaking Caribbean, is often credited with providing the greatest illumination regarding the phenomenon of maximum leadership in the region.
For Mr Best, maximum leadership was the result of replacing the power of the colonial governor, supported by the white plantocracy, with that of a local prime minister, accompanied by a transplanted elite. This was not too dissimilar to the independence of the Spanish American nations in the 19th century, when the imperial order was generally replaced by a ‘creole’ elite, whose members were, for the most part, themselves educated in the metropoles or influenced by the ideas of the European Enlightenment. And in the new Spanish-speaking republics, the almost inevitable consequence was, more often than not, dictatorship. In both Latin America and the Caribbean, it might reasonably be argued that, for the masses, the new order did not represent real political freedom and the full promise of independence was never truly realized.
In delivering the Third Annual Jagan Lecture at York University, Canada, in March 2001, on the subject, ‘Race, Class and Ethnicity: A Caribbean Interpretation,’ Mr Best located maximum leadership in the context of colonialism and independence, class and ethnicity. In this respect, he explained that maximum leadership was what it was because it had to do with “initial conditions of introduced populations and ethnic solidarity” for “once you have ethnic solidarity, in which people belong without a hearing, then you can only have one leader because nobody else is thinking.”
One of the underlying bases of Mr Best’s lifelong critique of Caribbean political culture was the pithy and pessimistic thesis, articulated in his Jagan lecture, that “‘doctor politics’ and maximum leadership and central power and personal domination are absolutely indispensable to the operation of the place.” In this particular instance, he was referring to his native Trinidad and Tobago. But he could easily have been speaking about other Caribbean countries. And even though he had coined the term ‘doctor politics’ in reference to Dr Eric Williams, the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Mr Best was referring at the time of the lecture to the then prime minister, Basdeo Panday. But he could equally have been speaking about the then opposition leader and soon-to-be second-term prime minister, Patrick Manning.
Last month, we noted that Kamla Persad-Bissessar had dispatched both Mr Panday and Mr Manning to the political graveyard. We did not however comment on the deeper significance of her trajectory from being just another opposition politician at the beginning of the year, to her election as political leader of the United National Congress on January 24, through her appointment as leader of the opposition on March 24, to the climax of her ascent as prime minister on May 24. Indeed, Mrs Persad-Bissessar’s election as UNC leader and then as prime minister has been interpreted by most as a clear sign that the political culture in Trinidad and Tobago has changed dramatically.
Michael Harris, a Trinidadian political analyst and disciple of Lloyd Best’s, had written in the Trinidad Express on March 30, 2009, that both the People’s National Movement and the UNC displayed “the same core characteristic: they are both organised and mobilise their support on the basis of race.” In this regard, Mr Harris echoed the words of his master: “Such a basis of mobilisation effectively eliminates from these parties any real politics. The supporters of these parties do not give their support on the basis of any reflections about their interests, or any thought about political philosophy or ideology. Race requires neither thought nor reflection. It is simply a mindless and automatic basis of affiliation.”
For Mr Harris, moreover, the “key point” is that such parties are given to maximum leaders and a distinct lack of politics, in the sense of an “ongoing contention of different ideas and clash of different interests.” Thus he concluded presciently over a year ago: “Mr Panday’s one-man style of leadership is not an aberration of individual personality but a core characteristic of the type of party that is the UNC (and the PNM). To effectively change that leadership configuration is in fact to change the nature of the party itself. And to change that one party is to change the entire regime of politics in the country.”
As has previously been recognised, it was ironically Mr Panday himself who sowed the seeds of his own downfall by taking the progressive decision to allow the UNC leadership to be decided by a popular vote within the party. And as the Trinidadian journalist, Tony Fraser, has surmised in his analysis of the “decline and fall” of Mr Manning in the Trinidad Guardian of May 26, Mr Manning was “so blinded by his own political advance, his emperorship, that he was unable to discern that the political culture was changing on him.”
Obviously, Mrs Persad-Bissessar was able to take advantage of the widespread desire for change in both the UNC and the country. Perhaps this might be considered serendipitous, but her defeat of Messrs Panday and Manning has made it clear that maximum leaders have expiry dates. The triumph of the coalition, the People’s Partnership, would also appear to have put paid to the fortunes, in Trinidad and Tobago at least, of monolithic parties built on an ethnic base. Moreover, the new prime minister, in her inaugural speech, has promised to “work towards reversing the order of ‘top-down Government’ to one for all the people.”
Thus, even as the vanquished PNM, with Dr Keith Rowley chosen by the party’s general council as the new leader, tries to come to terms with the need for reform and modernization, a new politics and a new approach to governance would seem to be the order of the day in Trinidad and Tobago. It is therefore extremely tempting to predict the end of maximum leadership there. Only time will tell whether this prediction is premature and whether such change will spread to other parts of the region.
