The Runner Stumbles
The most important outcome of the 1999 local government elections for the political leader of the UNC, Basdeo Panday, is that his party won big in those Corporations where they beat the PNM and lost small in those where the PNM beat them. It is not, you would think, that the UNC has lost the elections (a fact he will not publicly admit to), he has lost his bets, and they must now confront the realisation that it will be almost impossible to legitimately wipe out the numerical deficit in the next general elections and go clear of the PNM.
The facts lead us to contradict him: The most important outcome for the UNC is a clearer, painful realisation that there are very important social agendas in the society, other than theirs.
What are the relevant facts? There are at least six. The first is that the PNM beat them convincingly in the districts they targeted, despite the perceived greater expenditure in those districts than in the UNC strongholds. A second is that Panday's talk that the elections would be a referendum on his government's performance has flown back into his face. A third is that Griffith and Lasse have not brought any political value for them in these elections. A fourth is that Tobago NAR's Hochoy Charles has publicly and pointedly declared against them. A fifth is that the now Independent Pamela Nicholson has left their government and is vigorously estranged from them. And the sixth is that Nowherian Morgan Job is clearly not a political asset to them.
A number of painful implications spring readily from these facts, and I will attempt to list the most important. First, a validated, re-energised PNM will go for the UNC jugular in calculated ways. Specifically, they will harp for general elections at any time from now to the due date, and they will dwell on the theme that the UNC have traumatised the soul of the nation. Second, neither Griffith nor Lasse nor anyone who went in through the backdoor will bring benefit in the general elections; they will be de-emphasised and jettisoned. Third, the alienation of Charles and Nicholson means that Panday has no Tobago card to play. Whoever wins in Tobago will not join with the UNC if the latter need help to form the government; they are more likely to team up with the PNM.
How did the UNC end up in this unenviable situation? The answer lies basically in a political agenda which has been attempting to force the other major ethnic groupings to bend to the UNC will and to exhale in the House of the Rising Sun. Their election theme was to unite the nation within the UNC (my emphasis). NAR's Robinson gave them the government, but, with the departure of Robinson into the coveted Presidency, the NAR were stripped of both a credible political voice in the marketplace and their distinctive character in both parliament and the Cabinet. The coalition of parties quickly gave way to a government of the majority partner, where the strange doctrine of one voice and joint responsibility (strange, that is, in the context of a coalition) was invoked and the minority held on to their ministerial jobs, if not their consciences until, in Pam's case at least, water was more than flour, politically speaking.
Lasse and Griffith were stolen from the PNM, in a manner which was sure to vex PNM support, and which, further, was calculated to kill UNC dependency on little upstart, bothersome Tobago. But they haven't delivered, as those of us outside of the UNC knew they couldn't, and now the UNC, by their own unforced indiscretions, stand alone. It is important to point out that they stand alone by miscalculation, and not by clear (statement of) intent, which must be worse.
The UNC have been behaving as though they won an electoral mandate to lord it over everybody, when the facts are patently otherwise. The simple fact of the matter is that they won half of Trinidad and nothing at all of Tobago. Riding on Robinson's availing back, they stole from the displaced-from-government PNM and rumbled in the convenience of a majority-take-all system of governance. They have asserted themselves in clearly, if not ineluctably, ethnic ways in their hiring and firing practices and in their gifts of contracts. They have done little to realise, far less advance, the spirit of the Tobago House of Assembly Act; indeed, the evidence is that they have been quietly hindering the work of the Executive Council.
Then they went into the local elections as 'a triumphant force', to quote Lloyd Best, thinking their hype would win plenty of the PNM's apparently weakened support in the Corridor and in Point Fortin.
It was a self-delusion of monumental proportions, especially as they had done serious psychological injury to PNM supporters and the general public (much of it unnecessary) and had done little beyond the usual gifts of patronage to win over the ethnic publics they had targeted, and which they needed to advance their cause.
Clearly, the targets made them stumble in their headlong rush, but a truer reading of the situation is that the UNC made themselves stumble.
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