Reform commission faces backlash over lack of bold constitutional proposals

The Parliamentary Reform Commission (PRC) faced mounting criticism on Sunday from legal scholars, students and political figures who say that its long-awaited report failed to deliver the sweeping constitutional changes needed to break decisively with the country’s colonial past.

At a panel discussion hosted by the University of the West Indies (UWI) at Cave Hill’s Faculty of Social Sciences, law lecturer Dr Ronnie Yearwood said both the PRC and the previously tabled Constitutional Reform Commission (CRC) reports fell short of addressing the underlying colonial structures still embedded in Barbados’s governance system.

“In my mind, both [reports] encapsulated what CLR James called the idea of the colonial experience that results in Afro-Saxonism, as he called it, which produces limitations on the spirit, vision, and the self-respect of the former colonised people,” he said. “I think these reports reflected that limitation of spirit, that limitation of thought, there wasn’t a sense of anti-colonial thinking or anti-colonial action.”

Yearwood argued that despite months of public consultations and national debate, the PRC’s final report steered clear of major issues the public expected to be tackled, such as fixed election dates, imposing term limits for the prime minister, reform of the electoral system, and the thorough restructuring of Parliament.

He said: “There’s no way that you could come with a constitutional reform commission and a parliamentary reform commission, and essentially you end up with two reports, hundreds of pages pretty much saying, you know, the system is okay, after inducing the commissions, after the outcry from people wanting to change.”

Yearwood—a former president of the opposition Democratic Labour Party (DLP) before his ouster with the arrival of Ralph Thorne as opposition leader and later party president—also raised concern about what he called a “psychological inability” among those leading reform efforts to break away from the Westminster model and neocolonial systems.

“In some ways, what we get in these reports is what I would call a kind of neocolonial liberalism, it’s just a continuation of the current system. What the reports don’t deal with is that our systems are underlined by clientelism which we know–what we call the kind of ‘yard fowlism’ politics. We know that supermajorities, supported by the first-past-the-post system, dominate.

“We have excessive prime ministerial power, we typically have one-party dominance and all of these are the kinds of things that I think that people wanted addressed by their commissions and the commissions failed to realise and to address this,” he said.

Supporting his position was Rahym Augustin-Joseph, a UWI law student, who lamented that the report from the CRC failed to reaffirm the Barbadian tradition of free tertiary education as a constitutional principle.

“I wanted to see a bold assertion by this commission that reinstates the social democratic principle or the Barbadian principle of free tertiary education…. This has been a Barbadian tradition, a social democratic tradition from the 1960s,” he said. “This commission was not looking inward to be able to provide the answers at times, and they were very modest in this approach.”

Augustin-Joseph further contended that the commission missed an opportunity to challenge the political elite and lean on the voices of the people as a mandate for deeper reform.

Attorney-at-law and former DLP leader Verla De Peiza chimed in with a sharp critique of what she sees as selective political will when it comes to constitutional reform. Referring to the 2018 decision to amend the Constitution to accommodate the appointment of two senators who did not meet the existing eligibility requirements, De Peiza noted that swift constitutional changes seem only to be possible when politically warranted.

“They made constitutional change as it suits them, but what they need to have right now is the courage to make constitutional change that suits the country,” she said.

De Peiza emphasised that the current administration, which holds all 30 seats in the House of Assembly, is in a rare and powerful position to enact significant reforms, yet appears to be squandering that opportunity.

“That really is the part that is missing,” she continued. “We’ve had the conversations, we know what the people want, but the political will to bring it to fruition is what 30-love gives them that unique opportunity to do – and they are missing that opportunity.” (SB)