As the country gets accustomed to its Prime Minister’s
being regularly marked absent, what he does and says on occasions
he shows up claims higher than usual attention.
He declines to meet the Leader of the Opposition to talk about
the Chief Justice, and hardly anyone but Basdeo Panday notices.
Only some hardy loyalists feel a large snub was meant by Mr
Manning’s absence from the Eric Williams remembrance
wreath-laying at the Chaguaramas heliport.
When on Liberation Day, Mr Manning stays on in Tobago rather
than feed the Trinidad cameras with images of himself preaching
in Baptist robes, you may think the bright lights are becoming
too much for him.
Then he appears wearing dark glasses at the launch of bpTT’s
Cannonball platform in La Brea on April 1. And Prime Ministerial
watchers go, “Hmm.”
Days later, at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception,
every local dignitary but the Prime Minister turns up for
the Pope John Paul II memorial mass.
On the following day at Whitehall, reporters try to remember
the Prime Minister’s last appearance at the post-Cabinet
news conference.
This is hardly any longer the poster boy for active government.
Just last August, he had all but leapt off the plane from
Cuba after surgery, and promptly mounted helicopters to eyeball
hurricane damage in Tobago and Grenada.
Unsquintingly, the now-unbespectacled T&T leading man
held centre-stage for months thereafter—at home, in the
region and farther abroad.
Around mid-March, he was the star of the show at the LNG conference
in Bilbao, Spain.
But such glories don’t sell as well in the T&T market
where, with the Prime Minister suddenly under-exposed, people
ask, “Is he all right?”
Nobody expected such a slowing-down in a man who, just the
other day, gave the impression that a pacemaker in the chest
works like the batteries undyingly powering the Energiser
Bunny.
Mr Manning, some reporters speculate, has taken image-makers’
counsel to be less lavish of his presence. Less Manning could
well mean more good-looking politics, if the aim is to delink
the Prime Minister from the national condition once complained
about as “nothing works.”
The complainer was the late Prime Minister Eric Williams,
in a period much resembling the present. Despite infusions
of energy income, positive impact on general living standards
remains invisible or frustratingly slow in coming.
In the early 1980s, the Prime Minister and Minister of Finance
was also fuming about construction delays, water shortages,
traffic congestion, rising prices. He was setting up committees
to galvanise government responses, and looking to the protective
services to deliver water, gasoline, food, and even to clean
up after floods.
“Complaints have been pouring into the office of the
Prime Minister,” Dr Williams said.
Whitehall is once again a protest target. The present Prime
Minister is eager to point to delegated responsibility, as
for crime control, and to create new state enterprises to
clear implementation bottlenecks in construction and transport.
Lowering his profile as the glare of the spotlight becomes
harsher, Mr Manning presents less of a target. A pattern of
selective no-shows is the result.
A policy of selective no-shows implies more careful choice
of occasions in which to star. No bigger starring role now
offers itself than in the dramatisation of The Passion of
the Chief Justice, in which last week Mr Manning cast himself
as Pontius Pilate.
Chief Justice Sharma has already been brought low, his private
exchanges exposed, and he might even be pictured being publicly
whipped and spat upon. Worse is to come.
Mr Manning has now called into being an investigating tribunal,
and a whole process leading to the career equivalent for the
Chief Justice of capital punishment.
In his reading of the Pontius Pilate role, Mr Manning stresses
that he is duty-bound to put the “CJ on trial”,
as the Express headline summarised it. But he means no evil;
it’s not that he thinks the man guilty.
As if reciting a soliloquy, the Prime Minister enlarged upon
what he is putting himself through. It is an unpleasant duty,
a “solemn”, “onerous”, “awesome and
enormous responsibility”, undertaken with a “heavy
heart.”
Nor is he taking sides. He professes himself “devoid
of emotion or politics” and determined to proceed “without
fear or favour.”
Playing to the gallery of supporters, he is inviting admiration
for his performance.
Mr Manning reserved righteous anger for whoever had leaked
the tell-all documents to the media. To find the culprit,
he had even called in Scotland Yard.
Fear of detection and punishment did not prevent the leak
of yet another Chief Justice-related document days after Mr
Manning spoke. Justice Mark Mohammed’s statement turned
up in Newsday.
If not Mr Manning himself, some insider continues to leak,
undeterred. This reality undermines the sacredness Mr Manning
claims for the process he is undertaking.
But not really undertaking. For Mr Manning, also wanting to
wash his hands of it all like Pilate, claims he is just letting
things unfold. “I consider myself duty bound to allow
it to proceed,” he said.
It’s as if the process had somehow been triggered by
someone else, or by fate.
At this point, theatre-goers are shaking their heads. For
it was Mr Manning who had received, even encouraged, the secret
denunciations of the Chief Justice from the Attorney General
and the Director of Public Prosecutions, even involving an
acting Chief Justice, which may even include taped conversations.
The reports from those officials to the Prime Minister could
have only one aim: getting rid of the Chief Justice, while
all other protagonists remain uninvestigated, and unscathed.
Declining in advance the credit for that outcome, Mr Manning
is seeking applause for how he is directing and acting in
the dramatic build-up.
A man with his own passion play to stage hardly has need for
bit parts offered by the Baptists and the Roman Catholics.
