Phillip Paulwell | Slow-walking Republicanism

On March 23 this year, Prime Minister Holness told Prince William, the then Duke of Cambridge, and Kate Middleton, the then Duchess of Cambridge (now the Prince and Princess of Wales) that Jamaica was “moving on”. That comment was perhaps the clearest signal to date that the Government was planning to move Jamaica forward to become a republic.

Instead, the Government was slow off the mark and little was done until very recently. There was a Cabinet reshuffle and a new minister of legal and constitutional affairs, Marlene Malahoo Forte, was appointed. A Constitutional Reform Committee (CRC) is supposed to be appointed and the membership was stated to include “representatives from the Government, Parliamentary Opposition, relevant experts, and the wider society”. Recent statements from the Government suggest that this might be happening soon.

The Cabinet reshuffle is the only thing that has happened with effect from January 11 this year. There is still no CRC, and one does not know where the Government is going with its actual policy intentions on republicanism.

When the Government appoints a CRC, how long will it take for that body to consider what will be assigned to it and submit its report before any action can be taken having regard to the time-delay procedures in the Constitution for making this particular amendment?

Jamaica now has a new head of state in the person of King Charles III. The message was already conveyed to his son that we are “moving on”, and yet it has taken a long time to show that we are serious about becoming a republic.

MINISTERIAL STATEMENT

At minimum, there should have been a ministerial statement announcing the official formation of the CRC and its members together with its terms of reference some months ago. Will it be a government-dominated committee that will seek to impose single-party hegemony on the subject ? This will not be the way to go.

Surely, the Government could find a way to seek national consensus on this matter by making it an inclusive CRC so that we can treat this matter as a Jamaican initiative and not an initiative of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).

Does the JLP Government of Prime Minister Holness envisage going to the electorate in a referendum in which both the JLP and the People’s National Party (PNP) can hold hands together and seek the support of our population on a single cause or are they trying to find a way to make the republican idea their own to the exclusion of the PNP and civil society groups?

This does not have to be a wholesale constitutional reform that will seek to include other initiatives that will cause controversy and we find ourselves co-mingling the republican initiative with other issues that may divide the electorate and cause the republican idea to fail.

What is needed is a single-issue piece of legislation that will replace the monarchy of Jamaica with a republic of Jamaica. Others in the Caribbean have attempted to undertake wider constitutional reform while embedding the republican amendment in a bill that sought to overhaul the rest of the Constitution, and the entire bill was rejected, and with it went the republican amendment.

St Vincent and the Grenadines suffered such a fate in November 2009 when its Constitution Bill, which had been passed after the required time-delay procedure and the special majority in the Parliament, failed at the referendum stage and was unable to earn a simple majority, far less the special two-thirds majority of the electorate that was required.

Bundling the republican initiative together with other constitutional reforms is not the way to go to become a republic. There can be discussion around the mechanism by which a president of Jamaica can be selected or elected, but the intention is not to overhaul the monarchy to the extent that the King and his governor general are to be replaced by an executive president.

EXPECTATION

The dialogue to date has an expectation that the quasi-ceremonial functions of the governor general will be shifted to the presidency and Jamaica will no longer have King Charles III, his heirs, and his successors as our Head of State. This should not be too complicated as we can maintain the expectation that the president will function above the political fray to the same extent that the governor general has been functioning ever since we became independent sixty years ago.

Barbados addressed the issue by simply making changes to the monarchy and introducing the Constitution (Amendment) (No. 2) Bill 2021 on September 20, 2021. The bill went through all of its parliamentary stages in their House of Assembly on September 28, 2021. It went to their Senate on September 29, 2021, and then was taken through all of its remaining stages on October 6, 2021, and passed.

On October 12, 2021, Dame Sandra Mason, the then governor general, was jointly nominated by the prime minister and the leader of the Opposition as the sole nominee for the office of president. On October 20, 2021, she was formally elected by Parliament to become the first president of Barbados, and she was sworn into office on November 30, 2021 (Barbados’ Independence day).

All of that did not take very long because there was the determination and political will to drive the process on a single issue. The remaining constitutional changes that may be desired can then become the subject of wider national consultation and subsequent drafting. Let us not delay ourselves in this moment of national consensus on the issue of becoming a republic so that we can boldly march forward to reclaiming our state from its current monarchical status to become a republic.

Let us move forward with certainty to the Republic of Jamaica in time for our 61st anniversary of independence.

- Phillip Paulwell is member of parliament for Kingston East and Port Royal and former minister of science, technology, energy, and mining. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.