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Outdoing each other
November 22, 1999
Sir/Madam,
I thought when I did not get the time last week to comment on Mr. Manning’s speech at his party’s recent convention that I had missed an opportunity.
Then, yesterday, there is Mr. Panday creating more than ample opportunity for amends.
Well, firstly, the silver fox has, as is his accustomed wisdom with hindsight, changed his tune about the achievements of his government being more in 4 years. At least he now compares 4 years with 4 years of any previous government, rather than what any previous government has ever done.
His attempt at self-critical look at his party’s poor showing in the local government elections sounded so profound. Yet he fails to realise that it is the public perception of the corrupt practices (regardless of what the PNM might say) of his government and incompetence of some of his Ministers, that was largely their undoing.
The fact that he only now realises that ads don’t win elections in T&T (after all we are not the US nor ever will be) leaves one to wonder if the fox has lost his political savvy.
And, his solution, is really classic…hire party managers… He will strengthen his party by handing it over to more professional outsiders, like his media campaigners…
His promise to hold party leadership elections after elections at party groups to give the groups a bigger say in deciding candidates only reminds me of his similar promise before the 1987 local government elections. (Forgive me if the year is wrong)
If our memories permit, we will recall that those elections had the largest number of independent candidates in central Trinidad ever. Why? Because the fox and then chosen one Ramnath, went to party groups and replaced candidates chosen by the groups with their own hand-picked horses.
The fact is that neither the UNC nor PNM consider the masses of the people, whether members of their parties or not, to be more than voting cattle who must crowd the pens every five years only to be left out of governance in between these events.
The similarities continue in the way that each of them, admittedly in different fashions, have tried to influence public officers at this start of the latest election season.
Manning promised a pay increase and Panday Constitutional changes to take away their right to a disciplinary procedure based on natural justice, if public servants stain their fingers for them.
Well, Manning’s promise is as old as the NAR’s and just as unbelieveable. And the old Patos, probably didn’t think that the fox might complete the negotiations going on now and give public officers the raise he is only promising. (and the less said about his 100,000 houses the better…for him)
The fox also seems to have amnesia. It was Pato’s weekly litany about the need to amend the Constitution, threatening to remove Service Commission’s, that turned a lot of public officers off from him the last time around.
Poor fellas, they only seeing votes and trying silly schemes to catch them. It would do both political leaders well to realise that these are human beings with rights and they must be treated as such.
Both the UNC and the PNM have no real solution to the deep-seated chronic crisis that continues to plague this society. Getting a few people richer has never solved poverty and the dehumanisation of the majority of the population reflected in the hustle mentality that fuels crime, drugs and all other expressions of degeneration.
This crisis is a feature of the social and political system that they both vow to protect and cannot be solved within it.
While they view the “masses” as the fox calls them, as voting cattle to put them in office, they both serve the parasitic oligarchy and they, and increasing numbers of the masses know it.
That is why, try as they might, less and less people are being caught up in their vote catching antics and voting game.
On the threshold of the year 2000 that we are told marks a new era, it is a pity we are still faced with this outmoded brand of politicking which avoids the real issues.
HOMEPAGE
Copyright © Clyde Weatherhead
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