Tobago's Past, Present, Future

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Part #1

o The universe created 13 billion years ago.

o The earth formed 4 billion years ago through universal elements.

o Cellular organisms form on earth through the fusion of organic carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen atoms.

o According to the evolutionary theory( a creationism theory also exists in religion),

Part #2

The Flip-Flop1700s

In the year 1763, Tobago became a British colony under the Old Representative Government system where a representative and elected legislature held power. During this time, Tobago was being governed by Grenada but maintained a self-governing status. By 1768, the first bicameral legislature in the Caribbean met on 11th July 1768 in Georgetown/StudleyPark. Meanwhile, the island of Trinidad was still under Spain rule. Two years later, 1770, slaves began revolting on the plantations. At the same time, conflicts between indigenous people were ignited. In this decade, American had their American revolution in 1776 before Tobago could become a French colony in 1781. By 1789, the French Revolution had hit and its effects heavily impacted the Caribbean supply trade. The French eventually lost control of the island to the British in1793. It was not too long until Trinidad also became a British colony in 1797 under the Crown Colony rule where an unelected body of representatives and council controlled the power.

The Free 1800s

In 1802, Tobago again became a French colony. One year later,

Tobago became British. In 1805, the trading of slaves internationally were abolition resulting in a shortage of labour for the British. Tobago would change hands for a total of 31 times (so know your value Tobagonians) until 1814, where it became a permanent British colony, a member of the commonwealth. In1833, Tobagonian slaves receiveed emancipation. At the same time, Tobago was forging international relaionships with Grenada and St Vincent as apart of the Windward Islands along with a seat of government in Barbados. Unfortunately in the year 1846, an British law, the Sugar Duties Act, removed the opportunities Caribbean sugar had in British market. A plantation society based on sugar crop began failing and planters starting turning to metayage (share cropping) e.g. cassava, potato, cocoa.

In addition to this, in 1847, a major hurricane stunted Tobago's modernisation.

and a collapse of plantation economy. As consequence of Tobago's failing economy, in 1872 Governor Ussher suggested a unification of the island with Trinidad and in 1874, the Tobago Bicameral System, a part of the Old Representative model, was abolished.

The 1877 killing of a police corporal Belmana in Roxborough,

who had intervened in a worker’s protest by shooting a woman.

was approached, beatened and killed by an angry mob outside the courtroom leading to what is known as the Belmana riots.

A British-Barbadian Naval Fleet visited to quell the riot.

Tobago becomes a Crown Colony, at its own request.

It is useful to note that around this time, British visitors allegedly termed the Tobago, this miserable little island. At this time, another governor, Gore distressed over the financial state suggested union with Trinidad based on economy and proximity.

1880:

-Tobago began borrowing from Grenada gov’t to meet recurrent

expenditure. Estates began being abandoned by whites. Blacks started

owning estate and having political power.

-Crash of Gillespie and Co. which held interests in 19 estates.

-Drought on the island.

1885-Tobago placed under the Windward Islands Government with Grenada, St. Lucia and St. Vincent.

1886: Governor Robinson wrote to Sendall proposing utilising Tobago and Trinidad for economic and administrative efficiency.

:Colonial office proposed Tobago to be a dependency of Trinidad.

Governor Robinson stated this was inevitable and proposed the

Robinson plan.

:Formal notice of annexation published 2 Dec 1886

: Tobago planters wanted guarantees that Tobago would not suffer

from the union, that they would still have a voice and that an escape

clause should be provided. Tobago merchants were afraid of losing

the business to Port of Spain, fear of Trinidad taxation that was much

higher. British government declined. Trinidadians felt Tobago was a

financial burden.

1888: Order in council was passed 17 November to become a joint colony.

1889: 1st January: Tobago and Trinidad administratively unified. (collapse of Tobago sugar economy.

: Official control of Tobago’s financial board by Trinidad. Authority over

collection and expenditure; legislative powers limited to local

regulations with authority to collect taxes; Tobago lost its separate

and administrative identity.

: Only 3 of 32 distilleries left in operation; administration felt Tobago

bankrupt.

1898-20th October-Tobago became a ward-an administrative district to

Trinidad.

-Justice John Gurry went to Tobago and gave decisions in favour of

metayages.

-Ruling class wanted less union; lower class wanted more union as

Trinidad improved employment opportunities. Opposition on both

sides.

-Tobago was deprived of the opportunity for black rule by the

implementation of Crown Colony rule.

Impacts

1. “What was left of Tobago’s now toothless Legislative Council and advisory Executive Committee.”-Reginald Dumas

2. “Tobago’s humiliation was complete”- Reginald Dumas (in response to Eric Williams failing to bring about his promise of Tobago Self Government)

3. “Tobago was widely seen in Trinidad as a new parasite on that island’s body politic and financial might.”-Reginald Dumas

4. “Tobago had no voice in the legislative parliament until 1925 by the first elected Tobago representative James Biggart.”

- Biggart pleaded extensively for roads, bridges, improved jetties and ports, post offices, a Scarborough fire service, better schools, improved health services, and better telephone and sea communications. Nearly all his recommendations were ignored.

- It was he who won the agreement of the Anglican Church to establish Bishop’s High School here in Tobago. It was he and others who, in an early and unsuccessful attempt at devolution of political power, proposed that Scarborough and its suburbs be converted into a Borough, with a Council to manage the Borough’s affairs.

- Biggart was followed in the Legislative Council by Isaac Hope, and Hope by George de Nobriga, who owned the Lowlands and Cove estates and who was regarded as uncaring of his labourers’ welfare and as contemptuous of blacks. He once wrote: “The black man respects authority but it must be backed up with strength with a fair measure of benevolence.”

- The first election in Trinidad and Tobago under universal adult suffrage was held in 1946, and de Nobriga was routed for the Tobago seat by the legendary A.P.T. “Fargo” James, who won again in 1950 and 1956, but was defeated in 1961 by A.N.R. Robinson, as he then was. James died the following year, 1962.

- In and out of the Legislative Council, James fought hard, but ultimately without reward, for a return to Tobago internal self-government. He advocated representation for Tobago as a special unit within the West Indies Federal Parliament. He failed, but he did succeed in getting the number of Tobago representatives in the Legislative Council increased from one to two in 1961. James also proposed the construction of the Northside Road from Castara to Charlottesville, and fought, like Biggart before him, for improved health and education services in the island. He insisted on the need for a deep-water harbour in Scarborough. Craig-James tells us that it was he, in his “James Memorandum” to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1948, who “proposed dairy industries, manufacturing industries for cocoa, improved methods for fishing, electrification of the island

- There then followed a half century of neglect by Trinidad and Tobago’s Legislative Council until Eric Williams, the leader of the People’s National Movement, which won the general election in 1956, promised to pay particular attention to the needs of Tobago, which he acknowledged had exchanged the neglect of British imperialism for ‘Trinidad imperialism’. The benefits promised by Williams, however, failed to materialize. Significantly, there was no attempt to redress the imbalance in the relationship between the two islands in the 1962 Independence Constitution of Trinidad and Tobago. When the 1976 republican Constitution also ignored the relationship between the two islands, the first demands for internal self-government for Tobago began to be heard in 1977, led by ANR Robinson, the political leader of the Democratic Action Congress and the MP for Tobago East (subsequently Prime Minister between 1986-1991 and later the third president of Trinidad and Tobago). These resulted, in 1979, in the production of a draft bill, which made provision for a Tobago Island Council, empowered to formulate and implement policy in Tobago on economic planning and finance in general. Though this bill was rejected by the central government, it did lead to the introduction of the Tobago House of Assembly Act in 1980.

-Subsequent amendment to Trinidad and Tobago’s Constitution in 1996. This amendment also provided for an Executive Council of the THA, consisting of a Chief Secretary and such number of Secretaries as may be prescribed. At the same time, the Tobago House of Assembly Act 1980 was repealed and replaced by the Tobago House of Assembly Act 1996 (THAA 1996).

-This assigns to the THA responsibility over the matters listed in the Fifth Schedule, which include inter alia: tourism, the environment, health services, and education. The Executive Council, however, remains subject to the general control and direction of the central government. While the THA can propose and adopt bills which can then be transmitted to Cabinet with a request for them to be enacted by the national Parliament, no such bills have ever been enacted.

-When, in 2006, Prime Minister Patrick Manning presented the draft of a new Constitution for Trinidad and Tobago to the national Parliament, which simply replicated the existing arrangements and failed to make any mention of self-government for Tobago, the THA began in earnest to generate its own initiatives for constitutional reform. In October 2007, a committee under the chairmanship of Dr John Prince (the Prince Committee) was appointed by the THA to review the Constitution and the THAA 1996. It must be noted that reported by Reginald Dumas, his team conducted the same initiative and survey Tobagonians on Internal Self Government closely before, but his efforts were ignored by the THA(THA Imperialism?).

- Having consulted widely, the Prince Committee submitted its report to the THA in September 2011. This included two Bills providing for equality of status between the two islands, a federal system of government, and power to the THA to impose taxes.

- In the meantime, and quite separately to these Tobago-generated initiatives, the People’s Partnership, led by Kamla Persad Bissessar, which had won the 2010 general election, published its own Green Paper in 2012: Towards Internal Self-Government for Tobago. Attached to the Green paper was the Constitution (Amendment) (Tobago) Bill 2011, which sought to enhance the legislative and executive powers of the THA by providing for the establishment of a Legislature of Tobago which would have more or less exclusive responsibility for the matters designated in ‘the Tobago List’ and shared responsibility with the central government for the matters designated in the ‘concurrent List’. The central government’s Green Paper was not, however, approved by THA, on the grounds that it was a less comprehensive document and less representative of the views of the people of Tobago than the two Bills produced by the Prince Committee.

-Thereafter, despite several meetings between the central government and political leaders from Tobago, as well an exchange of correspondence between the Chief Secretary of Tobago, Orville London, and Prime Minister Kamla Persad Bissessar, little progress was made. By May 2015, the Chief Secretary, frustrated by the lack of progress, declared that the Central Government’s lack of enthusiasm had, effectively, stalled talks on self-government.

-However, the election in 2015 of the People’s National Movement, led by the Tobagonian native, Dr Keith Rowley, breathed new life into the process(or so we thought). In October 2016, a new Bill - an Act to amend the Constitution of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago to accord Self Government to Tobago - was approved by THA, and sent to the central government in accordance with s29 of the THAA 1996. Following clarification on several matters arising from this Bill, a revised Bill, the 2018 Bill, was approved by Cabinet and it is this 2018 Bill which is currently being reviewed by the JSC.

- Every single one of these proposed powers was rejected by the Cabinet. The reason given in each case was the same: Seemungal’s proposal “derogate (d) from the concept of a unitary state.” No such concept exists in the Constitution of Trinidad and Tobago, ladies and gentlemen; no such concept.

-Thus, Robinson’s 1977 motion was met in the ensuing debate by the alarmist and baseless remark from the then Attorney General, the late Selwyn Richardson, that in seeking internal self-government for Tobago Robinson was “asking (the) House to preside over the liquidation, or rather the fragmentation and disintegration, of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.” I have been reliably told there was a secondary reason for the government’s position: that Robinson, having deserted the PNM and, with Murray, defeated in Tobago, had to be put in his place. If all this was not the “Trinidad imperialism” that the same Williams had excoriated more than two decades earlier, I don’t know what is.

-Act No. 37 of 1980 – states at Section 21 (1) that “The Assembly shall formulate and implement policy on all matters referred to it by the Minister (my emphasis) and … the Assembly shall be responsible for implementing in Tobago Government policy (my emphasis) relating to” – and there follows a list of subjects, including economic planning, programming and development of Tobago resources; the provision of adequate infrastructure; and finance, in particular the raising and collection of revenue. These were precisely the matters, among others, that Seemungal had proposed should fall within the purview of his Tobago Island Council, not the central government. This was certainly not the internal self-government envisaged more than three years earlier by A.N.R. Robinson and Winston Murray. Rather, it was a cynical, colonial distortion of their request by the Williams administration.

-In September 1994, Manning delivered to the THA a draft THA Bill prepared by the central government. The THA team considered the document and rejected it. In our report to the late THA Chairman, Lennox Denoon, we said that the central government Bill marked “a considerable retrogression from the existing 1980 THA Act (and that) its effect would be to reduce Tobago to the condition of vassalage vis-à-vis the Central Government – any Central Government – of Trinidad and Tobago, and to entrench such vassalage in the country’s Constitution. The wardship that Tobago suffered for several decades … would, in retrospect, seem like a period of constitutional enlightenment.” It was constitutional underdevelopment with a vengeance.

-The THA team therefore drafted its own Bill and submitted it to Denoon that same month, September 1994. With some minor changes, Denoon sent it to Manning in March 1995. You will not be surprised to hear that when the government’s counter-draft came in September 1995 the phrase “within the policy framework of the Government of Trinidad and Tobago” had been added to all the responsibilities proposed by us for the THA in an internally self-governing Tobago. The central government mindset of September 1995 was therefore exactly the same as it had been in September 1980: Tobago was to remain a colony of Trinidad.

-As we were to find out, this attitude towards Tobago wasn’t only a PNM government position. In the light of confident assertions by successive THA Executive Councils about THA powers said to exist under the Fifth Schedule of the 1996 THA Act, it is relevant to quote what the then UNCNAR Attorney-General, Ramesh Maharaj, told the Senate on the 28th November 1996 during the debate on the Bill that led to the Act. He said: “In respect of all the matters in the Fifth Schedule, the Tobago House of Assembly, yes, can formulate, articulate and debate – which they are entitled to do, and it is a very good thing for them to be able to do – but the Cabinet of Trinidad and Tobago which is responsible for national policy overrides and has the power to supervise the Tobago House of Assembly affairs…What is wrong with that?” Where, after all this, were the “constitutional guarantees” promised by Manning in January 1992?

-There are those in Tobago, mostly politicians and their acolytes, who appear to have persuaded themselves that the 1996 THA Act conferred autonomy on Tobago. Nothing could be further from the truth. What the Act did do was conjure up an illusion of autonomy. I wondered at the time if there was such a thing as undemocratic internal self-government, but it has since been put to me that we do run that risk in small societies like this one.

-Within the last five years we have had the Ellis Clarke and Manning draft constitutions, devised in Port of Spain and including language on Tobago too inadequate for me to trouble you with this evening. We have also had three separate Tobago teams, one of them established by the THA, which have consulted the people of Tobago on their views and wishes regarding Tobago’s place in Trinidad and Tobago – or not, as the case may be. The teams have found that, overwhelmingly, Tobagonians wish to remain within Trinidad and Tobago. However, they are highly dissatisfied with the present system and strongly want devolution and internal self-government. Devolution, as defined by Wikipedia, is “the statutory granting of powers from the central government of a sovereign state to a government at a sub-national level, such as a regional, local or state level.” Bodies like municipal corporations and the THA would be at that sub-national level. “Devolution” differs from “decentralisation”, which in our political system has meant the execution of central government policies by bodies at that same sub-national level – in other words, the philosophy of Williams in 1980 and of Manning in 1994/5 and after.

- She said: “I cannot see Tobago agreeing with the decentralisation process (and) agreeing to go backwards ... We subscribe to the devolution model ...” (My emphasis.) Excellent. So do I. And if James Biggart and A.P.T. James were still alive, so would they. When, therefore, the People’s Partnership, headed by the same Kamla Persad-Bissessar, said in its manifesto for the general election of May last year that it would, if elected, pursue “the principle of autonomy” for Tobago and, among other things, seek to achieve constitutional and other amendments, including legislative authority for the THA, I naturally sat up. And once the PP had won the election, I started to lobby for change, especially on learning that the manifesto had been adopted as government policy.

-There are fears and suspicions, not only in Trinidad, that calls for devolution and internal self-government for Tobago are nothing but a thin cover for eventual secession and independence.

-These fears and suspicions are reminiscent of the apprehension expressed by the late Selwyn Richardson more than 30 years ago. They are totally groundless: the near-totality of the people of Tobago want to remain in a country called Trinidad and Tobago. But they want real Evolution of a Nation. Of course, there are secessionists, but they are a tiny minority. They tend to see life in terms of hostility to Trinidad and they feel that with energy finds off the Tobago coasts the island can go it alone. However, even if Tobago had the resources, especially the human resource, for independence – and I speak from long experience when I say it regrettably does not – even if that were so, there is no guarantee at all that an independent Tobago, with a population of only about 60,000 (if so many), would be admitted to the United Nations, which has become tired of mini- and micro-states. And Tobago would definitely fall in that category. In his time as a Senator, Speaker Wade Mark became a vigorous parliamentary champion of internal self-government for Tobago. We must all be grateful to him for that. But even he, I think, will admit that Parliament as a whole – whether the body we know as such today or the pre-internal self-government body of Legislative and Executive Councils – has done virtually nothing over the last 120 years and more to promote the constitutional development of Tobago.

- Administrations lay proposals before Parliament, and successive administrations have clearly been unwilling to propose the restoration of Tobago’s internal self-government. Parliament has had to follow suit. As I have indicated, the current government has, as a matter of policy, pledged to reverse that approach. I am advised that this is the first time that any of our governments has given so explicit a public undertaking on this issue, and I offer my deep appreciation. But we shall see if the pledge bears fruit, or if it turns out to be as barren as those which Tobago has for so long endured.

5. “Constitutional development? Of Tobago? What constitutional development?”-Reginald Dumas