Jun 14
Meryl James-Sebro interprets the rise of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissesar
Well, we reach. Early in the evening of May 24, 2010, Hazel Brown’s everlasting ‘Put a Woman’ campaign bore its first full fruit. Trinidad and Tobago declared Kamla Persad-Bissessar its first woman Prime Minister. And despite the expected questions, concerns about coalitions and acknowledged challenges about managing a testosterone-laden side, feminists, gender advocates and activists can’t help but sing victory songs…
Dear Norman:
I welcome any analysis of leadership in Caribbean. It is the area in which we most need new ideas and new praxis. Not that it is the only area, for new modes of following/being attentive and being involved cry out for change as well. However, it is most appropriate that Meryl should focus us on this issue of the leadership of the new Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. It is most appropriate too that she should remind us that vigilance is the key to any success realised in that particular situation.
Where I propose more caution is seeing the election of a woman as PM as the high point of any feminist dream. That is as problematic a vision, I think, as the belief that the female is a guarantee of the values of compassion, caring, and other positive values which Meryl is absolutely right needs emphasis in governance. But if these values come from the experience of being excluded and deprived as Meryl argues, then the new PM, woman though she be, does not look to me to have suffered much in those domains. Neither do most of her male colleagues.
Am I suggesting that one needs to have been poor to have community values or understand the need to bring them central to governance? No. I am promoting greater structural analysis and recommendations in our exploration of leadership.
It is not surprising that Meryl records that women in Trinidad and Tobago have a “rich” history of political participation but were often “overlooked”. Such a history has continued to be supplied by the women in the political parties called “women’s arms”. More than having the ministry of gender affairs placed in planning (naming is not above cynicism as I know Meryl knows) there is a more strategic external check that I would be more interested in seeing.
I would wish that the women groups of the parties which constitute the joint government of the country broker for a strategic and practical institutional relationship with the new PM with her cabinet. I would wish that this include scheduled consultations and that these be organised with these women as a single group. I want to imagine that this could also include input from the wealth of non-governmental organisations which helped to change the government in the country.
If these coalition women could also institutionally gather with the women of the PNM that would please me no end, especially if agendas could be determined among all the groups. Norman Girvan says I should live in hope.
I like Meryl’s insistence that subjective values and positions are not absent from governance. However, I imagine that unwillingness and comfort zones on the part of individual women who avoided leadership in politics were often the designed outcomes of a rich history of overlooking. I also insist that the overlooking is critically structural, up to the overlooking of issues most important to women as women regardless of who in the house. As such, these need far more structural interventions than the necessary oversight of a few avowedly feminist women in trinidad and tobago.
We looking. Everybody should be looking and disturbing we neighbours to get things right. Ent that what loving we one another like we love weself mean?
Margaret kawamuinyo