MOVING MOORE-MIGGINS

 

NEW TOBAGO LEADER TOTALLY UNLIKE ROBINSON

 

By Kim Johnson

Sunday Express

February 20, 2000

Page 11

 

Although both are attorneys, both come from staunch Methodist families, Robinson is completely unspontaneous whereas Moore-Miggins borders on being rash.  You can see it in how they speak; he does so carefully, slowly, with a robotic mid-Atlantic accent; she in an effervescent rush of Tobagonian.  He can't dance; she has played pan and sung calypso on stage.  He has always been concerned with the honours conferred by strangers; she values Tobagonian affection before all else.

 

There was something unsettling about my conversation over lunch with Deborah Moore-Miggins, 46, which preceded our interview, and it was a sense of her fundamental disinterest in wider national issues.

 

Does the People's Empowerment Party (PEP) have national ambitions?  "Certainly," she replied, citing the party's constitution.  And true, PEP's aims do refer to "persons who represent the organisation in the THA and in Parliament."

 

There's even one aim of "understanding global developments and advancements (sic.) in technology, and using them to the advantage of Trinidad and Tobago."

 

Generally, however, it is Tobago that pervades the document.  It's not just that five of the 12 principles for which the party stands, concern Tobago exclusively.  Rather, it's a more general ethos that is profoundly rooted in Tobago's small community.

 

A simple populism runs throughout the document and Moore-Miggins' political philosophy.  The word used, "empowerment", came out of the radical movements of the 1970s, when Moore-Miggins was in UWI.

 

But in Scarborough "empowerment" has a less intellectual and more homely spin to it, a Tobagonian insistence that leaders relate to people directly and with humility.  That simple idea forms the core of Moore-Miggins' political philosophy.

 

Born in April 1954, the third of Wilton and Yvonne Moore's nine children, the new THA Minority Leader grew up and was schooled in Tobago.  Her father had been a PNM councilor.  He drove a taxi.

 

"From the beginning I was involved in the Girls' Brigade, the Village Council, Mello Harps steelband, the Credit Union, the PNM Youth League," she says with a laugh.  "I sang calypso in Bishops in 1972, lose the key and my backers run off the stage.  When I say, 'Blow, boy!' they gone.  And they still here claiming to be my friend."

 

After she left Bishops High School, Moore taught English Literature and Language at Scarborough secondary for two years.  She was accepted to study literature at UWI, and then applied for a scholarship to do speech therapy.  "I thought it was drama or something to do with language."

 

All of that was abandoned when a friend saw an ad for the new UWI Faculty of Law, and took it to her.  "The minute he showed me, I knew it was what I should be doing," says Moore-Miggins.  "My mother used to read the newspaper reports of criminal trials, read them aloud to us.  She'd put a lot of expression into it, and that must have left some mark."

 

She graduated from UWI Cave Hill in 1977 with first class honours - the only one that year.

 

At the time many of her colleagues were surprised.  She was neither one of the outstanding crammers nor one of the glamorous girls.  Rather, Moore-Miggins was more known for her easygoing gregariousness and a sort of Tobagonian rootsiness.  She sang calypso and performed dialect skits.  Although she avoided student politics, and worked diligently, Moore-Miggins also partied and limed.  She spoke then as she does now: like a Tobagonian Tanti Merle.

 

After law school Moore-Miggins did a Masters in Canada, then worked for two years in Guyana as a Caricom legal officer.  (Her husband was a member of the Guyana Defence Force).  Back in Trinidad she spent a year in Russell Martineau's chambers.  It was a good place for an ambitious young lawyer to be, but Moore-Miggins abandoned it all to return home.

 

"I kept feeling the call to return to Tobago," she says.  "I attribute it to my rooted childhood in Bethel where I was happy and comfortable and well-grounded.  In Trinidad there were things I yearned for, the people I knew and grew with, the culture."

 

Today her chambers comprise a modest board house opposite Police Headquarters in Scarborough.  Her work is mostly small-scale magistrates' matters; maintenance suits, domestic violence, traffic offences, land disputes.

 

'I get more pride from serving people in the community than getting into the technicalities of law," she explains.  "Coming back here it seems my involvement when I was small, more impacted on me than my academic exploits."

 

Between 1988 and 1996 Moore-Miggins was legal advisor to the THA.  "It was an enjoyable place to work, you could see the sincerity and concern for people in those who served (or in the majority who served, because Hochoy Charles was there too)," she says.  "We were consulted as officers and our contributions respected.  I felt  - as compared to now - that our expertise was relied on."

 

She had long left the PNM for the NAR, and in 1995 ANR Robinson, then "minister extraordinaire" in the UNC government, asked her to serve as a senator.  She worked with the Guya Persad Committee studying the constitutional relations with the THA in 1996.  The Committee's recommendations for greater autonomy, by the time it reached Parliament as a bill, had been diluted beyond recognition.

 

By the new bill, the THA's policy-making function was subject to Cabinet approval, and Tobago state lands were vested in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.  It was then that she began to drift away from her patron.

 

"I felt I wasn't getting enough guidance from him and the party in the approach to a far-reaching piece of legislation," she explains.  "Certain conversations I had gave me the impression he'd lost interest in meeting Tobago's needs and his mind was somewhere else.  He was looking at the presidency."

 

It was bound to happen, so different were the two temperaments.  Although both are attorneys, both come from staunch Methodist families, Robinson is completely unspontaneous whereas Moore-Miggins borders on being rash.  You can see it in how they speak; he does so carefully, slowly, with a robotic mid-Atlantic accent; she in an effervescent rush of Tobagonian.

 

He can't dance; she has played pan and sung calypso on stage.  He has always been concerned with the honours conferred by strangers; she values Tobagonian affection before all else.

 

In November 1996 Independent Senator John Spence suggested the draft THA bill be sent to the THA for further comments, but the government side voted him down.  Though she was a government senator, Moore-Miggins abstained from the vote, and then resigned from the Senate.  The following month she left the NAR.  She contested the THA elections as an independent and won the Bethel seat, defeating both the NAR and the PNM.

 

Robinson has now thrown his weight behind Hochoy Charles who is Moore-Miggins' political enemy.  She has bitterly attacked Charles' recent losses in the ADDA deal and the Millennium Concert, saying that somebody should make a jail for that.

 

"I'm so concerned about eh mess of administration of Tobago that my immediate agenda is to root out the menace that is Hochoy Charles' regime, and replace it with an administration that is fair, concerned about the quality of life and true empowerment and committed to prudence and efficiency and positive growth," she says.

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