Election alert
Reginald Dumas
Saturday, April 3rd 2010
To hear Patrick Manning tell it, he was really bending over backwards to accommodate the Opposition. ’Since they feel that the time has come for a general election,’ he said, ’then I will agree with them. As a consequence of which I now direct the party to commence the nomination-of-candidates exercise for the general election immediately.’ Screening would begin in, where else, his constituency.
If my understanding of what I saw on the television news is correct, this announcement came right after his assertion to the effect that it was the people of T&T who were paramount. Why then at once forget the people and focus on Opposition wishes? And if the People’s National Movement is the democratic organisation he and others always proclaim it to be, how is it he, and he alone, could be ’direct(ing)’ the party? But let that pass.
Of course, Mr Manning may think he does have good reason to feel that the people, as a whole, want a general election. After all, ’the PNM,’ he told his convention, ’is better informed about what is taking place than any other political party’-and then he couldn’t resist adding-’or any journalist, for that matter’. He went on: ’We have been listening and staying in touch with the people. The PNM is ready.’
I don’t know which people Manning was talking about, but it’s certainly not the ones I’ve been meeting and hearing, especially in the last 18 months or so. Things have got to the point where I now receive communications from PNMites-till-dey-dead complaining bitterly about their Political Leader and the direction in which they say he is taking their party. They ask me to continue to write and speak out. Can you imagine? Reggie Dumas a surrogate for dissident PNMites?
Which alone tells you that, contrary to what Mr Manning appears to think, the PNM is not ready for any kind of national election. Yet I must agree with his decision, if not for the reasons he might have in mind.
Consider. The Government is under siege across the society: UDeCOTT/Calder Hart, Uff Commission, misspending of taxpayers’ money, property tax and Revenue Authority blues, crime, rising food costs and unemployment, declining gas reserves and prices, water shortages, Guanapo church, another deficit budget in the offing, traditional union rivals speaking as one, and so on.
Above all, the people see an indifference and a callousness that exacerbate the concerns they have about the society and their place in it. The government’s credibility has sunk so low, many people simply don’t believe Manning will actually call an election. (If he doesn’t, credibility will decline even further. Perhaps disappear.) And things only seem likely to get worse. Better have the election sooner rather than later.
It didn’t need to be this way. What Manning describes as his ’strong and determined leadership’ is nothing of the sort. Rather, it is a kind of misdirected and badly-informed authoritarianism founded on the unwavering conviction that the people have elected him to lead, and that leadership means decisions without consultation or discussion with the very people who put him there, as though omniscience has been automatically conferred on him by election and has become his private preserve. That, despite what he disingenuously says about himself, comes over as insensitivity and arrogance. And the virus has infected his ministerial mannequins and assorted satellites. No antidote seems available.
He declared the other day that the drug lords weren’t so much against the PNM as him. If the truth be told, this isn’t confined to alleged drug lords. It is now a national sentiment. In my view, if he leads his party into the promised electoral battle, the risk of defeat for the PNM, whatever the deficiencies of the Opposition, markedly increases. Among other things, voters will assume that a PNM victory in those circumstances would mean a sharp and irreversible rise, to the point of insufferableness, in the very arrogance and lack of sensitivity they now find so objectionable.
If Mr Manning were really to place his party’s interest above his, he would not only announce an election date, he would, at the same time, say that he would not be a candidate. For health reasons, he could explain. He won’t do that, of course, but I can still speculate briefly on a possible successor.
Keith Rowley, you might think, and, objectively, there is little doubt that Rowley possesses the best credentials. Problems would at once arise within the PNM, however: you would hear that Rowley is a Tobagonian; he is too turbulent; he challenged The Leader (a no-no for the FAB and others of a certain generation), etc. Already, a member of his constituency executive has been speaking as if Rowley’s rift with Manning is all Rowley’s fault. That attitude is precisely what you expect after an election alert is sounded-all hands on deck, fall in line behind the captain, discipline must prevail. Who knows, that may have been one of Manning’s calculations.
But if not Rowley, who? Well, what about the lady from Arima?
