Editorial
trinidadexpress.com
The rumbling and the tumbling in the atmosphere signals general elections, coming at us with the inexorability of a season, environmental or festive. Christmas, that festive season, is coming too. For which, Housing Minister Roodal Moonilal has promised non-stop distribution of State-supplied houses right up to December.
The election season is set to keep busting out all over, as T&T gears up for the climactic moment of choosing from the brands of political product on offer. Here, we do things in an ever bigger way.
The spread being unveiled by the People’s Partnership administration looks all-inclusive enough to cover both house and land. In 13 areas of east, south and central Trinidad, leases are being readied for handover to the landless, suddenly no longer the luckless.
Voters will see and hear the administration denounced for leasing Chaguaramas land to super-rich investors and developers. The answer being readied is that houses and lands are also being bestowed on people with neither shelter nor homesteads of their own making.
Certainly, the campaign will be about more than house and land. More than laptops for schoolchildren, roads, bridges and highways around the country, and the iconic box drains, the interrogation will be unrelenting: what have they done with all those billions?
The five-year record of the Partnership, pockmarked by mishaps and misadventures enough to summon suspicious attention, already attracts Opposition lightning and thunder. It is thunder that will be harnessed and projected by the PNM, once again to be acknowledged as the most deadly force in opposition.
As always, the PNM remains the national fall-back position. With its four decades in office, the PNM identifies as the default electoral option. Once again, the party’s outreach communicates the message that there’s nowhere else to turn.
After 1970, when the party had governed the country toward revolutionary tumult, mutiny, and riot, Prime Minister Dr Eric Williams proposed to the electorate a choice between the PNM and bacchanal. Since by then the troubles had been defused, Dr Williams was characterising the political opposition as perennial sources of chaos.
We cannot promise to take you to heaven, he said, but I can assure you they will take you to hell. Inside the party he founded, and among successor leaders, however, historian Williams has left no legacy of fervour for history. The lease of the Chaguaramas Convention Centre and adjacent land stirs only ersatz enthusiasm for recalling the Eric Williams glory days. Championing Independence, and claiming the peninsula for a sovereign national patrimony: that heroic era is more treasured today by people outside the party than in.
Still, the climactic electoral choice unfailingly presents itself as the PNM or Something Else. Five years ago, that Something Else was the wondrous formation of the People’s Partnership.
Popular expression took the form of the crossed forearms of one Percy expressively raised in the face of Patrick Manning, and the chutney refrain of “Go Nahâ€. For one gilded, but giddy, moment, a national majority persuaded itself that the Partnership, led by Kamla Persad-Bissessar, marked the promising start of something new.
The years since have been marked by the rhetorical and other about-turns induced by disillusion, but by little interrogation of the degree of shared responsibility for what had been wrought in the name of the Partnership.
For one schooled in the thinking of the radicalised 1970s, “new politics†could not for me lightly attach to the Congress of the People that helped form the Partnership. Immediately upon electoral victory, the COP people were assigned key Cabinet portfolios—Finance, Planning, Energy, among them. They would shortly figure in the high-cost juggling and ceaseless turnover of people that have been the hallmarks of Persad-Bissessar personnel management.
Fast forward to 2015, by when the non-stop trickle of withdrawals of enthusiasm and defections by COP people have swollen into a flood. Still, political leader Prakash Ramadhar may act as Prime Minister, signifying at least formalistic recognition of the COP’s Partnership standing.
Even as the COP elements identifying with Mr Ramadhar have stayed put inside the coalition, the rising tide of COP dissidents until now has remained a stagnant pool. It has thus taken five years for the disenchanted to constitute something called the Alliance of Independents which, if not destined to be a now-for-now election party, will presumably remain a platform of promise to do something tomorrow.
All of which eventually confirms for elections 2015 the familiar choice of the PNM or Something Else, the latter recognisably the Persad-Bissessar-led Partnership. This close to voting day, however, it is the political well-being and marketability of leader Keith Rowley that present a cause for concern in PNM minds.
The Prime Minister’s off-the-wall tactic of bringing a parliamentary no-confidence motion against the Opposition Leader appears to have some destabilising effect. Fitzgerald Hinds calls it a “feeble attempt to embarrass†Dr Rowley. The party has, nevertheless, taken it seriously enough to bestir a “Rally Round Rowley†movement.
It’s too early to assess whether, at the big 2015 moment for the PNM or Something Else, the leader’s status could devalue from asset to liability. But not too early to worry.
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