The face of the Government

A.J.Nicholson, Contributor

AS TIME passes and the history of our parliamentary democracy comes to be examined, Tuesday, June 1, 2010, will come to be remembered as the day when two members of the House of Representatives, Mrs Shahine Robinson and Mr Clive Mullings, came to represent the face of Jamaica's Government.

This became manifest in a sitting of the House, at which one was absent and the other present, and a sitting which facilitated a debate on a motion of no confidence in the prime minister, the stated reason for which, it is hoped and expected, will never again even come to be contemplated in our journey as thinking people.

The issue of trust, on which the no-confidence motion was grounded, applied also to the two members of Parliament- in the case of the forcibly absent Robinson, in relation to her approach to the weighty matter of her constitutional entitlement to sit as a member; in Mullings' case, as the outspoken defender of the trust which, he says, ought to continue to be reposed in the prime minister.

I admit, up front, to being biased, in the sense that the prime minister and I belong to different political parties. So, I pose a question or two to the unbiased among us: How do you feel about our head of government meeting with the prime minister of Australia, with the Australian, looking across at the Jamaican, examining the features of a man concerning whom the United Kingdom newspaper The Telegraph, recently had a news item with a headline which screamed, 'Jamaican PM accused of blocking drug lord trial?'

Ruling concerning

A few further questions: Consequent on the Prime Minister's actions over the last nine months, are you willing to trust him to be the general who leads us in the war against the crime monster that is strangling Jamaica's forward movement? Are you confident he will tell us the truth concerning the strategy as we sacrifice, and may pay the ultimate price, in that war? Can you have a feeling of assurance in taking orders from such a general? Or, is it that there is an overriding bias that is embedded in the minds of the unbiased, which trumps any consideration relating to the prime minister's actions and to "let bygones be bygones", as his predecessor as party leader so famously signaled after that much publicised beer-drinking celebration in his constituency?

In April of last year, the judgment of our Court of Appeal, in a ruling concerning the West Portland constituency, sent a message that the legitimacy of the Government and the Parliament, itself, was seriously in question. Robinson's right to sit in the House was also being questioned in the courts and the issue was yet to be decided. The message sent by the Court of Appeal appeared to have been lost on Robinson and the leader of her party, the prime minister, from whom we heard not one word of rebuke of her when she had the effrontery to refer to the exercise in the courts to have the situation regularised as "a waste of energies, time and money."

The allegation against Robinson was more stark than the reasons put forward for the challenges that had been mounted regarding her fellow travelers in the House, for the allegation relating to her was that, while serving as a member of Parliament, she had placed herself "under an acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience or adherence to a foreign power", thereby rendering her disqualified to sit in the Chamber, according to the provisions of our constitution. If that was true, not only would she have been disqualified for election as a member in the 2007 general election exercise, but her seat should have become vacant before that time, when she had made such a declaration of acknowledgment.

Following the lead

After she had made her contemptuous statement in the House, I wrote: "Robinson, in thumbing her nose at the exercise, is simply following the lead of the head of Sovernment, who regards the initiative and, supposedly, its outcomes as a 'blatant attempt to constitutionally overthrow' his government, brushing aside the fact that the legitimacy of his government is itself in question".

Now this 'waste-of-time' initiative in the courts of the land has led to Robinson's exclusion from the House in her leader's darkest hour, so far. The court prevented her from voting with her colleagues in the rejection of the no confidence motion brought against him as a complete waste of time, a view expressed by other unbiased individuals within the Jamaican community. The face of the present Government is spotted with examples of disrespect for, and selective adherence to, the rule of law. Though the prime minister might be the chief exemplar of that disruptive approach, Shahine Robinson, particularly in her forced absence from the House, is representative of that face of the Government and which took shape from the earliest days of the administration.

The motion of 'no confidence' that was debated in the House of Representatives came in the wake of dangerously spurious actions on the part of a prime minister, such as never before experienced or imagined in Jamaica. We wonder whether they are not unknown to any other part of the Commonwealth, and we know they have been a rarity in any part of the global village. They constitute a stain on Jamaica's landscape that will probably take generations to be erased.

The apology

None of the issues raised against the prime minister's ill-advised adventure was exaggerated or could be repudiated, and neither he nor any of his cabinet colleagues dared to challenge any of them in the Parliament although, for a long time in the public domain, his parliamentary colleagues, both in the House and the Senate, claimed that he had done nothing wrong. And, curiously, on the very day The Gleaner's lead story carried the headline 'No apology, No Resignation'. according to his colleagues, the prime minister made a public apology to the nation.

In other words, the prime minister, outside of Parliament and within the Chamber, belatedly acknowledged wrongdoing and apologised. Yet, there is, ever so often, some misguided maverick, moving to attempt the impossible. After he finally owned up, leaving his fate in the hands of his colleagues and God, up jumps the great advocate, Mullings, seeking to prove that the charges to which the prime minister had pleaded guilty, albeit with some nebulous explanation, had not been proved. And what is more, he receives the applause of those who dared not open their mouths in their leader's defence. After all, he had already publicly rebuffed their attempted public defence of him.

The irony is that Mullings was the only parliamentarian in the governing party, who had reportedly expressed any misgivings about the approach of the prime minister and the government concerning the extradition issues during their nine-month series of flip-flops. We did not hear of any denial coming from him in relation to that news item. In his outrageous attempted defence of his wounded party leader and prime minister in Gordon House, Clive Mullings represented the face of the governing party in its chameleonic approach to the management of public affairs.

Nobody ever said Jamaica's road to development was going to be easy. The messy nine-month risk-taking regarding delicate extradition issues relating to charges of transnational drug and gunrunning will make that road exponentially more difficult to traverse. The view, in the international arena, of a Jamaica and its Government and prime minister embroiled in a United States-Jamaica standoff concerning matters which are widely regarded as a lubricated conduit of terrorist activity across the globe moves our country into a category which has no good points.

Point lost

Add to that horrible positioning the fact that the prime minister pleaded guilty, to the extent that, as far as the original presentation of the request is concerned, there has been no change in one word, one punctuation mark, one sentence. We are where we started last August, except that an arrest warrant has been issued. And, yet, we are left to wonder whether the world will not consider that the essential point has been lost on some of the most influential in our midst.

For, consider this! With the roasting that Jamaica continues to receive in international information systems; with the edginess that Jamaicans continue to suffer at home and abroad; with death and devastation in a section of the capital; with a law-abiding, strong family man killed by the security forces inside his home in an upscale community; and with the subject of the request still at large, the startling reaction of a professor of government, no less, at Jamaica's premier university to the decision that the authority to proceed would finally come out of its nine-month hiding place is the question: Can the minister of justice not change her mind?

The prime minister pleaded guilty to unprecedented and devastating charges in the House of Representatives. Thirty of the judges, including himself, ruled that no sanction was required. But Senator K. D. Knight was sanctioned in his absence by judges drawn from the same pool, for referring to the minister of justice as "stupid". Behold the face of Jamaica's government!