As we reported in this paper on Monday, Ms Kamla Persad-Bissessar won a decisive victory over longstanding Leader of the UNC Basdeo Panday in the party’s leadership elections. Ms Persad-Bissessar’s selection for chairmanship of the party was won by football organization icon and businessman Jack Warner, a sometime ally of Mr Panday. The party election was marked by a persistence of twists and turns by leading personalities of the party, including the now other defeated candidate for the leadership, Lawrence Ramesh Maharaj. Prior to the 2007 elections, Mr Warner had supported the new political party, the Congress of the People (COP), led by Winston Dookeran, but soon defected to support Panday. On this occasion, having encouraged Panday for some time, he defected to supporting Ms Persad-Bissessar. Mr Warner, in replying to a question about his abrupt departure from the COP, was quoted as saying, “Yesterday was yesterday but today is today,” an aphorism which neatly summarises the fluidity which has characteristed the UNC for some time now.
Mr Panday has certainly not recovered the increased stature which he had gained before, and for some time during, his government’s tenure in coalition with ANR Robinson’s National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) in 1995 (on that occasion both the PNM and the UNC had obtained 17 seats each, with the NAR gaining the other two in Tobago). With the parties each gaining an equal number of seats (18-18) in the 36 member Parliament in the 2000 elections, now President Robinson delivered the Government to Patrick Manning of the PNM. Following this Mr Panday and some of his former ministers found themselves in the law courts facing a slew of allegations of corrupt behaviour in office, and he seems not to have recovered from the popular backlash of disapproval which they engendered.
The PNM having been returned to office in the 2002 elections, Panday, in and out of court between that and the following five-year period, faced a number of challenges to his leadership, up to undertaking a feint in which he appeared to allow Winston Dookeran to gain the leadership of the party, only to take it back again. At that time, when Kamla Persad-Bissessar was induced by some to seek the leadership, Panday forced her into a humiliating public climbdown. But Persad-Bissessar had by then gained a peg on the party’s political ladder when, in the face of Panday’s temporary suspension from Parliament, she had become Leader of the Opposition. From that period she has kept herself in the political limelight, a situation enhanced by popular feeling among the party’s supporters that Winston Dookeran’s COP was not gaining the kind of strength that would allow it to gain a majority among the UNC’s supporters.
The 2007 election, however, showed that the essential base of the UNC ethnic support was maintaining itself, for while the PNM won with 26 seats to 15, the party gained 45.8% of the vote to the combined UNC/COP vote of 52.3%. With no real improvement shown either in Panday’s political deportment or his position in the law courts, Ms Persad-Bissessar was clearly encouraged to fly her flag again. She has also been encouraged, it would appear, by what would seem to be the increasing unpopularity of the PNM and Mr Manning as a result of internal disruptions within the party following Manning’s removal of the popular and leading PNM figure, Keith Rowley, from the cabinet. Mr Rowley’s refusal to withdraw into silence since the elections over what would appear to be some degree of justification for allegations of corruption, and a level of criticism of the PNM in the media and among sections of the business class which have not been heard for some time, all seem to be keeping an audible amount of rumbling going on in the PNM.
While Mr Panday has been indicating that the results of the party election may be challenged in the courts, this is unlikely to give his cause any traction. Having founded the NAR in 1989, after the collapse of the Afro-Indian coalition, the National Alliance for Reconstruction, that displaced the PNM in 1986, and having successfully led its mainly Hindu-Trinidadian supporters to power for the first time in 1995 with the rump of the NAR, he has progressively come to be seen as somewhat unstable in his political manouevrings.
But perhaps more importantly, there is the view that he failed his supporters in terms of his inability to solve the sugar question, leaving office in a situation in which it was generally accepted, as oil and gas exports and income gained increasing supremacy in the economy of the country, that the structural adjustment programme which all the parties had accepted as required for Trinidad and Tobago after 1986, necessitated the closing of the sugar industry. When the PNM on its return to power in 2001, subsequently took the plunge and closed down the industry, it was Panday who took the brunt of criticism from his supporters, the sugar workers, given that he had for so many years led them as their union leader.
Though there was not much loud public criticism from his political supporters, it was widely felt that they have resented his apparent neglect of their business as it pertained to their fate and that of agriculture in Trinidad. He has been relatively silent on these issues, and in recent years has given no indication to the former sugar workers that he had any notion of what might be done on their behalf.
So, it would seem Ms Persad-Bissessar and her main backers have been able to take advantage of this gradual delegitimation of Panday in recent years, and to counter a challenge from Lawrence Ramesh Maharaj, widely seen as a strong legal advocate of the opposition’s causes, but unable, having persistently tried over the last decade or so, to gain popular support among the UNC electorate.
Ms Persad-Bissessar and the UNC will now be hoping, in the light of some public opinion polls that have been showing the PNM on a downward slide, to be able to draw the COP at least into a formal alliance that can restore the UNC’s traditional strength. Whether the COP’s Winston Dookeran will be persuaded is left to be seen. But there is no doubt an anxiety among the 22.5% of the electorate who supported the COP in 2007, and which include non-traditional UNC supporters, to find a way to remove the PNM. No doubt too new UNC Chairman Jack Warner will be pressing them to pressure Dookeran. And no doubt he will be seeking to persuade them to understand that, in today’s new UNC circumstances, “yesterday was yesterday, and today is today,” and to draw their own conclusions.