By Mickey Matthews
New UNC Chairman Jack Warner
When, in late November, Jack Warner announced his decision to run against Basdeo Panday, then Chairman and Political leader of the UNC, he was in fact signaling that for him at least, the issue in the January 24 election would be Panday’s succession.
Panday’s conviction on a violation of integrity legislation had brutally brought this issue to the fore in the constituency carved out by the efforts of Bhadase Sagan Maharaj and the Capildeos in the quest for representation for Indos as we approached first self government and then political independence. Succession, however, remains the transcendental theme of our time. This is so ineluctably the case that the mischievous business of Panday conceding minority leadership of the House should not distract us..
Everywhere, in trade unions and credit unions, in the panyards and in the world of business and politics, the independence generations are compelled, whether by attrition or conscious deliberation to give way if only, as is the case in quite a few instances, to a successor generation that is inherently transitional.
Only time will tell whether this is so in the case of Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s succession of Basdeo Panday, although her landslide victory over her “guru” does present her with opportunity more real than that muffed by the once anointed Winston Dookeran. She can conclude the UNC leg of a process that is ongoing, troubling and engaging in every other theatre of politics, big and small.
It is the common view that the succession to the Robinson/Charles continuum of leadership in Tobago could not but be transitional. After the Chambers cameo, Manning fudged the issue in the PNM, first by a less than transparent re- election and then by a culling of his rank as if the bloodletting would win him the key to eternal life. Some such fate awaited the issue of succession in the UNC after Panday returned to undo his anointing of Dookeran and the courts set aside his conviction had not the trio of Warner, Maharaj and Peters not staged a revolt against his stonewalling.
This revolt propelled Mrs Persad-Bissessar to the leadership of the UNC. To say that is not to diminish her own exertions and achievements; nor is it to sneeze at the wit and tact she must possess to survive in the male-dominated world at the top of which Panday stood supreme, hostile to pretenders to his crown.
However, the newly minted leader of the UNC must consider what would have happened at any point in her campaign had it not been for Jack Warner’s nimble-footedness. She could take as a random beginning, what would have happened on the day of the elections had Warner not have forces on the ground equipped to police the polling and to repulse attempts by Panday loyalist to steal the elections?
As decisive as that is, it was only the crowning piece of the comprehensive plan Warner had engineered for Panday’s demise. The first two had been guerilla-type strikes at Panday’s citadel. One broke up a council meeting chaired by Panday. The other targeted the opposition’s flagship city of Chaguanas where the collateral damage was the office of Mayor Suruj Rambachan. Collectively they punctured the aura of Panday’s invulnerability on his home turf.
In the air-war, so to speak, Warner struck at Panday’s legitimacy by defining him as a leader who was both a liability and without mandate. He expressed his desire to contest the elections, dragging in his opponent in conciliatory tones. With the battlefield defined, he upped the ante and plucked Kamla Persad-Bissessar from the bosom of Basdeo Panday in a very precise reading of the evolving political situation in the UNC and the changing balance of forces.
Left outstanding after all these maneuvers were the pledge he had made to Ramesh Maharaj, his comrade- in- arms at the start of this offensive, and the psychological warfare of the final days of the campaign. Maharaj’s commitment to running ensured that there would be a contest for the leadership in the days of uncertainty, but once Persad-Bissessar’s candidacy was established, Warner was quick to denounce Maharaj’s as nuisance.
He next took charge of the psychological warfare by backing a picket of the offices of Kelvin Ramnath, partisan chairman of the membership committee. The picketers demanded their right to vote in lieu of the return of their membership fee and transparent arrangements for the elections. Moreover, from the rear guard, Warner promised “a long hot summer” if the demands were not met, expressing the same level of conviction in now promising the longest period of “tranquility” for the UNC under his chairmanship.
In gauging her own strength, Kamla Persad-Bissessar must indeed weigh the role played by the streetwise and slippery Warner in driving the politics to this point.
In 2007, Sepp Blatter, Warner’s boss at FIFA, said Jack Warner had intimated to him his ambition to be the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Panday’s allegation of a file on Persad-Bissessar held by Warner, is metaphor for the way this ambition, coupled with his role as financier, had worked to block her ascent to the leadership of the UNCA; even though Panday’s right to Couva North may have closed that option off.
In the new UNC dispensation, unlike the old, rival ambitions need not derail partnership among leaders. But for it to work to mutual advantage, the new leader would have to concede Warner’s right to his ambition by accepting him as rival collaborator within the concept of working in tandem to deliver the exciting new vistas for which the UNC membership voted.
A Warner that is secure in both constituency and party would be better able to address the problems of the east/west corridor- something neither Warner nor any of his co-ethnics in the UNC has ever enjoyed but which could be crucial in the corridor’s marginal constituencies.
