Diary of a mothering worker. June 30, 2020.

Post 381.

As election season blows in, many of us, perhaps a growing number, continue to hope that political parties will fight a clean campaign. I think particularly of young people, voting and perhaps paying attention for the first time, and the example they will see. I think of the young women being trained by the Caribbean Institute for Women in Leadership (CIWiL) and their fears they have about the greater risks they face as future candidates when the fight for power gets dirty.

In hoping for a clean battle, ordinary citizens have a tool to hold parties to account. It is a Code of Ethical Political Conduct, first created in 2014 and revised last year in time for the Local Government election. The Code is available on the website, www.politicalethicstt.org, and provides a basis for complaints to a Council for Responsible Political Behaviour, comprising citizens and political parties.

I joined the Council last year, as a representative of the Network of NGOs of Trinidad and Tobago for the Advancement of Women, and have learned a lot since. The Code encourages peaceful, free and fair elections, tolerance and respect for human rights. It secures parties’ commitment to refrain from practices that promote divisiveness and violence. All political parties – including emerging and small ones – should be a signatory to the Code, which means that they agree to uphold the integrity of the electoral process in their own campaign and in that of their rivals.

This may sound like a lot of nice, but ineffectual words except they refer to real challenges we face. In the last weeks, we have seen personal attacks on candidates in San Juan/Barataria, allegations of biased hamper distribution in some constituencies, racially-opportunistic posturing by sitting MPs, and even months of instability in Guyana created by lack of electoral integrity. The goal is to stop descent into hate and violence through building consensus on some basic ethics to which we can all agree.

All over the world, codes such as these are used by citizens to report abuses of persons and power, and to argue that basic decency should not be collateral damage of politicians’ ground war. From a broader perspective, we should do whatever we can wherever we can to promote peace, for a more politically peaceful society is also one with greater peacefulness in communities and families.

The Council starts election monitoring three months prior to 5^th anniversary date of the last election, or three months before an election is normally considered due. It monitors political parties, candidates and supporters’ adherence to the code, often on the basis of citizens’ complaints of violation of the Code to the Council web page, or the email info@politicalethicstt.org.

I’ve been impressed and guided by the complaints that come in, which show how many citizens value fairness, are appalled by demeaning language and disgusted by corruption, and believe that candidates’ gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion should not be attacked or a basis for discrimination.  

The Code also prohibits use of rewards, such as money and groceries, to induce citizens to join a party, attend a public meeting or vote for a candidate. I wrote my PhD on, among other things, election campaigning in a marginal constituency in 2002, and I can tell you, with full certainty from over a year of fieldwork, that inducements were common practice then, particularly for a party in power with access to welfare and other resources.

Poor voters would be threatened with loss of CEPEP or URP jobs if they didn’t visibly campaign. Poor people are smarter than politicians though. For all of them would talk about wearing the shirt and waving the flag, before voting how they choose. In a sense, this is why political parties get desperate and resort to all kinds of shadowy strategies – particularly when it is a close call, as in this election, and when momentum builds to do anything you must to win.

The Code enables us to not simply be voters, but to informally govern the hustings and to assert the terms and conditions by which competing parties should abide. It gives us power during the campaign and not just at the ballot box. It says that ‘we the people’ are watching. The Council has no legal teeth, but ethical words and deeds should not have to be enforced with a heavy hand. They should be a symbol of all that a party stands for, and being regularly reminded of that expectation by a cross-section of citizens should suffice.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. April 29, 2013

Post 95.

Like a sizable section of the country, I watched Jack Warner’s nationally televised speech until late in the night after a long work day. Ziya was playing around me, pretending that the bed was a bus she was driving to the grocery and trying to get me to strap in my seatbelt while sharing the imaginary food she had enthusiastically prepared for dinner. She was spoon-feeding me, saying, ‘eat, eat up’, and beaming with pleasure as I did so. After our meal, Zi became obsessed with washing her hands, which, like any toddler, is her strategy for getting to turn on the tap and play with the water, and eventually I had to take her downstairs to the sink and soap to stop her from complaining, falsely, about her hands being dirty.

Ziya is two years old, Jack is seventy, but what they were doing was not so different. Jack was also dealing in the imaginary, trying to convince his constituents and the national community that he is in the driver’s seat and that his destination has certainty. Ziya had some idea of a grocery in her head, a collage of the ones she’s visited incorporated with sites drawn from other memories. Jack was creating a collage of his power and efficacy, narrating the world as he saw it from his leadership in FIFA, CONCACAF, past ministries and his constituency, also mixing in selected memories. Simultaneously, both he and Ziya wanted me to buckle up for the ride, with Jack’s fiction involving admittance to gravely unethical decisions without recognition of wrongs, discomforting contradictions escaping in every direction, open display of patronage’s power to twist politicians and voters into supplicants, and threats to show us all his excellence at revenge and love.     

‘Eat, eat up’, they both said, Jack, like Ziya, needing us to agree that the plate we already know is empty is yet the food we really need. Both were spoon-feeding me, beaming with pleasure and invented possibilities. Yet, all was thin air indeed. Action man that Jack is and savior to our nation’s souls long abandoned by non-functioning state institutions, his declarations of party loyalty and Cabinet despair, of personal autonomy and subordination to electoral rules, of international deal-brokering and photocopied paper-trails gleam like gold-spun strategy rather than the straw of ethical accountability. Ziya’s fantasy was charming, but Jack’s left me uneasy. The difference between his and my politics, and UNC politics, came through the TV clearly.

Maybe that’s how it was for others watching, maybe my generation could view his theatre skeptically, maybe we are fed up of truths never intended to reveal, and maybe as a society these moments are how we come to conceptualise the kind of politics in which we can actually trust. Or, maybe not. Maybe Jack leaves us willing to play along though we know not what to believe and are not sure what end he has in sight.

Maybe at the end of the night, when all both Ziya and he is want their hands washed, we will be too weary to insist on differentiating clean from dirty. As she grows up, all I can hope is that Zi learns to distinguish childhood creativity from adult charades that conceal reality.