DICTATORSHIP ANYONE?

Looking at the present political landscape in Trinidad & Tobago many people have expressed the fear that we are heading the same way as Venezuela did under Chavez and Maburro (and yes, the misspelling is deliberate) and we soon will be under the crushing heels of untrammeled dictatorship. Certainly, there are rather disturbing signs that this may be so. For example, the recent Judgement concerning Brent Thomas who was arrested in Barbados and brought back to Trinidad without a warrant of extradition and the rather strange defence being put out in the public space that he was involved in rather nefarious criminal activities as justification for this action although no evidence was ever led in Court about these alleged "criminal activities". Whatever happened to the old adage: it is better for ten guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to hang?

 Then there is the rather blatant attempt to interfere with the democratic process by postponing local government elections for more than a year and (so far) refusing to acknowledge that the matter has been dealt with by the country's highest court and that should be the end of that. Instead we have had no less than the country's Attorney General saying in effect that the Government was not wrong because five judges agreed with him (the AG). It didn't matter that the system dictates that the decision of the highest court is the one that counts. Instead it seems that the decision of the highest court is only valid when the Government agrees with the verdict! And the list goes on.

But the question is: are we on the road to a dictatorship? And the answer is that there are certain signs that we are indeed heading in that direction. There are still some judges who fiercely fight for their independence, but certain judgements falling from certain judges are not only clearly wrong, but carry with them the appearance of being heavily biased towards one side or the other.  It is becoming so that one can almost predict which way a decision on a constitutional matter will go until it reaches the Privy Council. And whether it is true or not some judicial decisions seem more to be based on race than on law, at least, that is the perception. And in politics perception is reality.

And if that wasn't bad enough we are witnessing the death of truly independent journalism. Independent journalism insists on showing us what we learn - fully and fairly - regardless of whom it may upset or what the political consequences might be. Independence calls for plainly stating the facts. And it calls for carefully conveying ambiguity and debate in the more frequent cases where the facts are unclear or their interpretation is under reasonable dispute, letting readers grasp and process uncertainty for themselves. Somebody once said comment is free but facts are sacred. And we get a lot of comment masquerading as fact from our newspapers.  But a free and independent press is an absolute requirement for a democracy.

Put another way, if we are indeed heading towards a dictatorship like Venezuela then the newspapers are helping greatly in that regard. They are neither truthful nor neutral. Drawing false moral or factual equivalence is neither objective nor truthful. You can also ask (if you think that Maburro is such a great leader or that a dictatorship is not necessarily a bad thing) why has approximately one third of Venezuela's population of some thirty million people fled that unfortunate country.