look meh Sea Grapes make the papers
Rocky road for Mr Dookeran
Judy Raymond
Trinidad Express
Tuesday, October 30th 2007 Gary Griffith was supposed to be speaking in Santa Cruz on Saturday night. Instead he was standing in a crowd on Saddle Road in Maraval, holding his small son and listening to his wife speak.
Mr Griffith is the COP candidate for St Ann's East, and earlier, in search of a COP meeting in that constituency, I'd made for Uncle Beddoe's Supermarket, not far from the Croisee. I was looking for one of the party's two "big" meetings advertised for that night, to see what kind-and size-of crowd they got.
The answer was none at all. Instead there was a small PNM platform in Uncle Beddoe's car park, along with a handful of Anthony Roberts supporters. It seemed the COP venue had been hijacked.
So I ended up at the party's meeting in Maraval. There COP organiser Ken Emrith later told me the PNM was due to hold a meeting "next door" to Uncle Beddoe's, so the COP had decided to postpone its meeting until Thursday, for fear of a clash between supporters. They weren't taking any chances after that day's attack on their Laventille West candidate, David Sinclair.
Mr Griffith's wife, Nicole Dyer of Diego Martin Central, spoke about the attack, angrily and articulately, urging COP supporters not to be intimidated by it. She is becoming, despite her lack of political experience, a very good platform speaker, which is rather unfortunate for the COP: something has to be wrong if a novice is the best orator in the party.
The COP's most extraordinary performer, however, is surely Rocky Garcia, the candidate for Diego Martin West. He came out swinging, apparently rapping-inaudibly-over the music of "Sweet T&T."
But even after the music stopped it was difficult to understand what he said. "Solid as a rock"-his campaign slogan-"is grassroots," he yelled, "but is a consciousness I refer to the thing called conscious, and we can only get it by change."
Volume couldn't compensate for clarity, but I can say for sure that Mr Garcia expressed concern about poverty and the need for racial unity.
"Rastafari!" he bawled unexpectedly (Mr Garcia may be grassroots, but he is also middle-aged and white). "Positive vibration! We have to bridge the gaps between rich and poor so we can weigh the scale and bring it up to consciousness."
He was contemptuous of the other parties: "We can't go down voting for PNM 'cause is a black man thing! Waaaste of time! We can't go down voting for UNC 'cause is a Indian man thing! Waaaste of time!"
Then there was Winston Dookeran. Up to now I haven't worked out whether COP members see Mr Dookeran as a charismatic leader or a figurehead. If the former, why? And if the latter, why him?
Mr Dookeran himself is admirably quick to credit the various teams of experts who have formulated the party's policies on issues such as justice, and agriculture. He listed some of these experts on Saturday, adding in his English-as-a-second-language way that the party was "deeply embedded with democracy."
Poor Mr Dookeran is now speaking at two meetings a night, or more-that day he'd already been in Morvant and St Augustine. Sadly, practice has not made perfect. On Saturday night he told the crowd-mostly middle-class, middle-aged folks from the area-that under a COP government there would be a ministry of justice "so that the rule of law is prevailed." Security was the primary issue a government should concern itself with, and the COP would "enforce the law on anti-crime and anti-laundering." He tried to communicate something about the PNM's secret Constitution, warning that there seemed to be more than one version, which added "more compunction" to the problem.
Well, sometimes you know what he's trying to say. But does he? It's not just nit-picking to notice his green verbs, tortured syntax, malapropisms, wrong tenses and non-sequiturs.
There are many kinds of intelligence, but among those required of a national leader is the sort that involves clear and rational thinking, and the way Mr Dookeran speaks doesn't inspire confidence in his thought processes.
Or his eyesight: "It's a wonderful sight to see all of Trinidad and Tobago here tonight," he said. The evening's chairman, Roy Augustus, also tried to put a positive spin on the small size of the meeting: it was a local crowd, he said accurately, with not a maxi taxi in sight.
The Maraval gathering, however, though the crowd was keen, didn't look like a national meeting held by a winning party mere days before an election.
But then, some very odd things are happening in this campaign. A week earlier, the PNM could only pull a surprisingly small and sluggish audience in Diamond Vale, at the heart of one of its Diego Martin strongholds. The UNC is bringing in massive crowds-though generally in fleets of maxi taxis-yet scoring in single digits in some of the wildly contradictory opinion polls. With less than a week to go before the election, any number could play.
