It appears more and more in some nations that leadership and respectability are no longer the starting point for national dialogue, but instead what we are seeing is a lowering of the bar for decency. It is evident we are in the dark ages where elected leaders have become poor exemplars, these troubling days now seeing us gagging on an unhealthy diet of vicious tweets, the mildest of these missives set loose with egregious misspellings; or worse, without even an inkling both subject and verb are not in agreement.
Or as in this case of extreme disrespect, noted in Trinidad and Tobago last week, when its Prime Minister Keith Rowley resorted to a disparaging, ad hominem attack on the leader of the Opposition, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, accusing her of “jammetry”.
With its origins in French patois, the word “jammete” describes a woman through use of the pejorative and deprecatory to be a vulgar person, someone who creates scenes and makes scandals public; what is even worse, the word contains undertones of a woman who is a prostitute.
For a leader to resort to such language is to hit a new low. Surely, this is not what one expects from an office holder who heads the State as the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, this nation being a leader within Caricom and the wider Caribbean region.
Head of the Social Justice Commission and a member of the Equal Opportunity Tribunal Leela Ramdeen is right to call out Prime Minister Rowley for making such an unsavoury statement, saying to do this is unbecoming of a leader. Declaring he should be careful about how he speaks, she said: “Leaders need to use language to lift people to a higher place.”
Ramdeen is absolutely right in expecting better from a head of state.
This is not the first time the holder of this eminent office has offended with his use of uncomplimentary and scathing remarks. As newspaper columnist, Ralph Maraj has observed, in the last two years Trinidad and Tobago has “had little that is poetic, soaring or profound from the utterances of this Prime Minister, Rowley failing in a leader's cardinal responsibility to a nation”; instead, Maraj notes, “it has been a surfeit of crudity”.
Adds Maraj: “We must be concerned! A Prime Minister's language must serve the refinement of his country. Too often has Keith Rowley been raw and degenerate, fuelling the crassness, decadence and superficiality already corroding a society in the throes of deep decay.”
However, since this disheartening discourtesy, Rowley continues to maintain he was neither abusive nor obscene, saying, “I am not getting involved in those discussions. I didn't abuse or I wasn't obscene to anybody or anything like that. If people want to spend their time discussing nuances of words, I am not, really.”
Earlier, Rowley’s behaviour was defended by PNM lady vice-chairman and chair of the PNM Women’s League Camille Robinson-Regis. True to the public relations style that recasts narratives as these inside the spin of “alternate facts”, Robinson-Regis said: “I do not think the Prime Minister meant it as Mrs Persad-Bissessar herself. From how I heard him use the term, we felt, or I felt at any rate, that it was just said in the context of the mechanism that is being used to try to get political capital out of everything even before an investigation is done. I didn't think he meant it as personal, something personal. He made an adverb out of a noun. That word doesn’t exist.”
At the end of all of this, it is clear what Prime Minister Rowley said was “reckless and demeaning”, as the UNC National Women’s Arm has correctly described his statement. He should heed its call for an apology, not only to Persad-Bisessar, but to the nation as well.