When Kamla Persad-Bissessar ousted Basdeo Panday, the founder-leader of the United National Congress (UNC), back in the heady days of January 2010, on her way to becoming the first female prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Mr Panday had cried foul. Sour grapes was the reaction of the new UNC and the general public.
Ironically, even as Mr Panday continues today to question the integrity of the UNC’s internal election process – so much so that he seems to have discouraged his daughter and political heir apparent Mickela from running in the party’s December 5 elections – two of Mrs Persad-Bissessar’s former supporters, ex housing minister Dr Roodal Moonilal and ex trade minister Vasant Bharath, are now challenging her for the leadership of the party whilst also expressing reservations about the fairness of the process.
In an editorial on Tuesday, the Trinidad Express warned that “what is left of the UNC’s reputation for integrity in public and party affairs” could suffer from a flawed process and disputed internal election results. Mr Bharath, at least, seems only too aware of this. On Saturday, at the launch of his slate of candidates to contest the elections, he voiced his concerns about “manipulation of the votes” and also warned against misconduct and arrogance in office. In this respect, he was critical of the behaviour of some of his erstwhile ministerial colleagues, without calling names, and admitted that the UNC had made many mistakes during its five years in office, allowing “institutions of authority” to break down almost irretrievably. All this, he suggested, was responsible for the defeat of the UNC-led People’s Partnership in the September 7 general election.
Mr Bharath more pointedly stated that “maximum leadership” was a recipe for disaster. This was undoubtedly a jab at Mrs Persad-Bissessar’s leadership, both as political leader of the UNC and as former prime minister. By extension, it was also a criticism of the UNC/PP’s unsuccessful, presidential-style campaign strategy, which focused on ‘Kamlamania’, the personality cult built around Mrs Persad-Bissessar, to the detriment of the other PP parliamentary candidates and the battle for constituencies in Trinidad and Tobago’s first-past-the-post electoral system.
Maximum leadership is, of course, the term coined by the late Trinidadian intellectual, Lloyd Best, one of the most original thinkers of the post-independence, English-speaking Caribbean, for whom the phenomenon represented a simple substitution of power, as one elite replaced another – in the case of the Caribbean, a local prime minister assuming the mantle of the colonial governor. The inherited Westminster tradition, as such, is still not fully formed and is still maturing in the Commonwealth Caribbean; in the hands of charismatic politicians practising tribal politics, it can be subject to cynical manipulation and abuse even.
The supreme irony is that Mrs Persad-Bissessar’s election as UNC leader and then as prime minister was supposed to have heralded a dramatic change in the political culture of Trinidad and Tobago, which might have had positive spin-offs in the rest of the region. This, unfortunately, did not come to pass. The promise of transformational politics remains unfulfilled. Mrs Persad-Bissessar seems to have been seduced by the noisy plaudits of the pit and gallery, succumbing, like her predecessors Patrick Manning and Mr Panday whom she had dispatched to the political graveyard, to the hubris of power. Now, having failed to keep her governing coalition intact and having led the PP to five electoral defeats – in the Tobago House of Assembly, local government elections, two by-elections and the general election – she is fighting for her political future, even as the UNC must rebuild and retool to recapture some semblance of political respectability and relevance beyond ‘Kamlamania’ and beyond its ethnic base.
The UNC needs look no further than the ruling People’s National Movement which, after its resounding defeat in 2010, elected a new leader in Dr Keith Rowley, who pursued an agenda of internal reform and modernisation, culminating in a return to power in September.
But a country’s political culture does not change overnight and it is still too early to predict the end of maximum leadership in Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean as a whole. Old habits, of course, die hard. But the quest for consensual politics and good governance must continue. And critical to this will be the recognition of transparency and rectitude in internal party matters, as well as the need for parties to reform and modernise, as core principles of governance indispensable to performing effectively, whether in opposition or in power.
