Gabrielle Jamela Hosein is a feminist, activist, poet and Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.
We will never know what motivated People’s National Movement (PNM) party leader and Prime Minister Patrick Manning to call a snap election half way through his term in office. Some say that he feared some of his own Ministers would vote against him in an Opposition-led No Confidence Motion in Parliament. However, this kind of mutiny is unprecedented and unlikely in Trinidad and Tobago’s Westminster experience. The best analysis was that the PM feared being linked to the corrupt dealings of his grand vizier and Udecott (a state construction company) head Calder Hart, feared the fall out from billions misspent, imagined the two main opposition parties as so weak and fractious that they would be incapable of uniting, and believed that patronage, race and even religion could rally the masses to give him a new mandate. This mandate might even have been big enough to permit fundamental constitutional reforms and to restyle Manning as an Executive President.
Manning claimed he dissolved Parliament the day before the debate to prevent the Opposition Leader, Mrs. Kamla Persad-Bissessar, from making libellous statements under the cover of parliamentary privilege, but this too is unlikely. In the heat of the campaign, he confessed that he had been secretly circling possible dates for the election since October. The multiple dates were not indicators of his options. Rather, they were attempts at subterfuge to prevent any spies, in or out of his party, from guessing when exactly D Day would be. Others pointed out that perhaps Manning’s Spiritual Advisor, Reverend Pena, called the date for him.
In retrospect, the decision was always to be an ill-fated one. The United National Congress (UNC) had been in election mode since December and, like the entire national community, was buoyed by the election of Persad-Bissessar to the post of Party Leader and Leader of the Opposition. Kamla had done the almost impossible in ending the long rein of Basdeo Panday, a much-loved Man of the People whose political leadership spanned forty years. After a clean campaign that called on her identity as a politician, mother, grandmother and woman, she won the bitter internal election by a vote of 13: 1. UNC members knew that the national community would never choose Panday to be PM again. She had done something few women, and no Indian woman, had ever done in politics globally. She came into power independently and on her own terms with no family connections to legitimize her name. In the gayelle of politics, Panday’s busshead earned Kamla respect even on hypermasculine terms.
The other main opposition party, the Congress of the People (COP), had been in party-building mode since 2007 when it garnered 140 000 votes, but failed to win a seat. Rather than dissipating, under the leadership of past National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) politician Winston Dookeran, the party began to form alliances with unions, black power leaders from the 1970s, farmers and citizen groups in campaigns to, for example, axe governmental plans to raise property taxes. Though seen as a middle-class party, the COP had significant national support and respect. They too began to rein blows in the gayelle when their lawyers revealed family connections between Calder Hart and a company that had received millions in construction contracts. Hart had denied this connection under oath in the Uff Inquiry into Udecott. The COP brought marriage and birth certificates from Malaysia that proved Hart had lied.
Jamaat al Muslimeen Imam and leader of the 1990 attempted coup, Abu Bakr, had also come in swinging his poui in the dusty ring. In courts as high as the Privy Council, Bakr had accused the PM of cutting deals with the Jamaat in return for guaranteed votes from areas of the country where they had influence. The problem was that the PM reneged on his end and Bakr too was out for blood. From here, the centre stopped being able to hold. Finally, Manning had become widely reviled for his spending decisions, perceived arrogance, public bad mouthing of his rival, Keith Rowley, inability to adequately deal with issues of health, justice, employment and crime, the threat of increased taxation and alienation of the media.
In this melee, Kamla was the rising star. Like Venus, she was the loving alternative to Manning’s war-like Mars. She was admired by many of all generations and ethnicities, seen as less afflicted by corruption than Manning, more charismatic than Dookeran, more good looking than everybody, and finally a candidate for Prime Ministerial power that everyone could vote for. She had paid her dues in party politics and the historical momentum was always on her side. She apologised for her party’s past sins, paid respect to and then swiftly dismissed Panday’s mottled legacy, appeared to rule a growing coalition with a gentle fist and perhaps most importantly, had been given a blank campaign cheque by FIFA Vice President, MP for Chaguanas West and shadowy puppeteer, Jack Warner. She made history a second time by leading a coalition of parties (the black power centred National Joint Action Committee, the union-based Movement for Social Justice, the greater autonomy-seeking Tobago Organisation of the People, the middle-class, multi-ethnic Congress of the People and the rural, Indian, working class United National Congress) into an election under the single banner, the People’s Partnership. Never had this been attempted in the post-independence period.
Election day, May 24th propitiously symbolised Manning’s entry to politics in 1971 at the age of 24. However, it was also exactly four months to the date that Kamla won party leadership, the day before Basdeo Panday’s birthday, falling at the peak of celebrations leading up to Indian Arrival Day on May 30th. Any Whe Whe banker would see these inauspicious conditions for the PM’s rash bet.
The campaigns themselves were also telling. Very quickly the PNM got nasty, labelling the Partnership a ‘frankenstein’, calling candidates ‘a bag of dead bones’, insisting, with the kind of veiled sexism often directed at women, that Kamla was weak, and incapable of making decisions and handling power, and joking in racial undertones about how the Partnership song should be ‘gimme a Guinness and Puncheon’. Unwisely, Manning even disparaged the NJAC leader Makandal Daaga for the actions of the 1970s Black Power revolution, a movement which improved the status of all Afro-Trinidadians. The Partnership had also drawn attention to unanswered questions surrounding Manning’s involvement in a church being illegally built by his Spiritual Advisor on land donated by Cabinet. Manning tried to whip up a sentiment of religious persecution among evangelicals, but this tactic was as unpopular as those relying on race. When the party began to roll out promises that seemed to spend billions in a mere fifteen minutes of speechifying, everyone wondered why go to an election at all if this impressive menu of plans was already in place.
The Partnership meanwhile experimented uncertainly with various slogans and tag lines, cheesy 1980s US pop music by Celine Dion and Bryan Adams, long wearying speeches read from the page by Kamla, new hairdos and outfits for the political leader, a bewildering array of gifts from a laptop for every school child to million dollar prizes for chutney music competitions, and a switch from orange to yellow as the party colour. Their start seemed fitful, chaotic, confused and a little boring. However, largely the campaign was kinder, gentler and cleaner. Yet, once the money started to flow, things got more sophisticated. Hands down, the Partnership had better calypso, ska and chutney songs clearly underlining to the population, ‘can’t vote for that’ , ‘Manning have to go’ and ‘we will rise’. The PNM’s zesty tunes were criticised for emphasising Manning as a leader standing alone, rather than with other strong colleagues and candidates. The Partnership’s ads were also more effective with a key attack waged by simply showing clips of Manning and Rowley at each other’s throats in Parliament. Added to the popular opposition invocation, ‘Do so’ and hand gesture to block the devil, the balloons, flags, confetti, stage screen and frothing of PNM speakers failed to convince. The public fight down between the grim faced Rowley, now post-election Opposition Leader and Interim Party Leader of the PNM, and Manning was the nail in the coffin. It seems hard to believe that Manning once asked reporters if he looked like an insecure man, because surely he was.
Kamla made history for a third time by winning a landslide victory. Amazingly, no political pundits dared suggest her conquest could be so absolute. All relied on traditional voting patterns dictated by race, class, geography and party loyalty, powerful fears of an unstable coalition, a Caribbean tendency to apathetically ‘like it so’, the power of the incumbent’s spending, and skepticism about Partnership candidates, including Kamla herself.
Even if this is an exceptional and unrepeated moment in election history, Persad-Bissessar’s fourth victory is that she has compelled a substantial rewriting of how party politics and voting is understood in Trinidad and Tobago. As US citizens had to with Obama, we wait with bated breath to see if she will live up to her own promise.
(This is one of a series of weekly columns from Guyanese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)
