The late Lloyd Best, one of our – the cricket-playing Caribbean’s – finest thinkers, up there with George Lamming and C.L.R. James, in my estimation, was fond of recalling the Chinese proverb that “when the wrong man does the right thing, the right thing becomes the wrong thing”.
If Lloyd were alive, I wonder what he would make of last week’s announcement by Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar that Trinidad & Tobago would withdraw criminal appeals only from the Privy Council, leaving London in charge of civil matters; and I want to believe Lloyd might have declared it a case of the wrong woman doing the wrong thing.
You wouldn’t know it, from what emanates from official Port of Spain nowadays, but Trinidadians are past-masters of subtlety. Not long ago, the same place that gave us last week’s gauche announcement gave us such genius observations as: the tailor who could cut a suit, not by just looking at a man, but by being shown the last corner he passed; the man who stole a river and sold it to a man who owned a reservoir; and the magistrate who tried himself.
Pick a Sparrow lyric, a Kitchener melody, a Shadow bass line, a David Rudder song or a V.S. Naipaul or Sam Selvon or Earl Lovelace sentence at random, and any one of them shames last week’s bald-faced declaration of intent to do whatever it takes to resume hangings in Trinidad.
Wherever you stand, personally, on capital punishment does not matter on this issue. In most Parliaments I’ve read about, death penalty statutes are free votes. Individual Members of Parliament are not required to toe a party line because a person’s stand on the taking of a life is a matter of his conscience, and his or hers alone to make. The religious would call it a matter between a man and his Maker; but this is a matter of taste, not conscience.
What counts – and tells – is that the Trinidad prime minister phrased her comments in a way that invites – indeed, requires – the conclusion that Trinidad and Tobago was not attempting to honour her overdue Treaty of Chaguaramas commitment to abandon the no-longer Mother Country and embrace her Caribbean brothers and sisters. Once again, as she did with her gratuitous statement that Trinidad and Tobago was not an ATM card for the Caribbean, the prime minister has needlessly offended the very people she should be pleasing with any announcement of intent to join the Caribbean Court of Justice.
It’s not helped that the first President of the CCJ, Michael de la Bastide, who bears (and earned) Trinidad and Tobago’s highest national award, immediately pointed out that, even if criminal appeals were taken away from the Privy Council, capital cases would still go to 11 Downing Street since such appeals are grounded in constitutional – that is, civil – and not criminal law!
In her haste to send a message to the bloodthirsty voters of Trinidad, Mrs P-B appears to have tripped on her own noose. Perhaps Lloyd Best might even have concluded that this might have been a case of the wrong woman doing the wrong thing in the wrong way.
