From 8-4 to 6-6?
By Dr. Winford James
January 09, 2005
In the last Tobago House of Assembly elections, the result was 8-4, 8 for the PNM and 4 for the NAR. After years and years in the wilderness, the PNM had finally dislodged Robinson's NAR, their campaign essentially fired by charges of corruption and lack of accountability on the part of the Charles administration in respect of the ADDA and Ring Band affairs. In this year's elections, with the collapse of the NAR and its virtual replacement by the DAC, and on the delusion that they have run Tobago well over the last four years (astonishingly mistaking maintenance for transformation!), they want all 12 seats; and for a time at the outset, it seemed they would be a runaway horse. But candidate selection and the hustings are good at changing impressions and fortunes, and it seems they have.
I am one of those who felt that they would win by default, but so much has happened since that I am now sure that that runaway win is not going to happen. For the health of any democracy, runaway wins are never a good thing; the potential for arrogance, corruption, and abuse of rights and freedoms is so great as to be intolerable. In the case of Tobago's democracy, such a win would be despairingly backward, chronic problems having become more entrenched under London's PNM administration, and with the prospect of more entrenchment, given the silly political philosophy of quiet, backroom, follow-Trinidad maintenance of the status quo.
There are at least three important developments that have changed my perception of the PNM's fortunes. One is fallout, in both the hierarchy and the rank and file, over the selection of candidates - something that could be fatal in an electorate that is as small and closely knit as Tobago's. Jordan is now going up for the DAC, having been passed over for the durable Cynthia Alfred, and he is far more popular in the Bacolet-Mt. St. George area than she, certainly more hardworking. Quaccoo is now going up as an independent, having been rejected for Roberts, he too being more popular in the Canaan-Crown Point area than Roberts. Arnold is bitter at not being even considered for selection and is running as an independent against London himself in the Scarborough-Calder Hall area. Subjected to the same treatment as Arnold, Mc Kenna too is bitter and has joined forces with the DAC and is lending vigorous support to the DAC's Tracey Tobias in the Belle Garden-Goodwood district.
This fallout is partly due to a conviction among the party's principals that people like Mc Kenna and Arnold were not team players and, furthermore, were an embarrassment to the party in their public behaviour. It is also due to a longstanding belief that the party will prevail over individual displeasure, anger, and hurt since voters will be voting for the party rather than for the individual candidate. It is a belief that ignores the role of community pride and spite in Tobagonian politics.
A second development is the validation and reinvigoration of the DAC. To cut a long story short, the NAR has become the DAC, despite its problems with Charles' style of leadership, and the two most powerful indices of that mutation are the crossover by leading NAR personalities, notably Cecil Caruth and Miriam Caesar-Moore, and public declarations that Hochoy Charles is a far better politician for Tobago than Orville London. Suddenly, Charles has rapidly regained credibility, especially for removing Tobago NAR politics from under the inconvenient hierarchical control of the Trinidad NAR. It is a state of affairs that forces comparison with the Tobago PNM that has ruled Tobago under the dark shadow of the Trinidad PNM, with one absolutely miserable consequence being Manning's self-delusional pronouncement that Orville, who is about the same age as he, is 'my beloved son in whom I am well pleased'! Gosh! Trinidad and Tobago, father and son!
The third development is linked to the other two as well as to the submissive politics of the Tobago PNM, and it is the erosion of the slim majorities that the PNM won by in 2000. I don't have the 2000 figures before me as I write but my memory tells me that, with the involvement of the UNC and the PEP, the margins were about 100 or so. If disaffection with the PNM is strong and growing, and if the NAR-turned-DAC is gaining ground rapidly, who will the UNC and PEP votes as well as disaffected PNM votes go to?
On the assumption that the DAC will keep its four seats, and on the further assumption that Bacolet-Mt. St. George and Belle Garden-Goodwood, if not Canaan-Crown Point, will be retaken, the DAC should win at least 6 seats. 6-6 or 7-5 would be a great result for the health not only of Tobagonian politics but also of politics in the nation as a whole. It would open up the politics and concretise, more than is the case now, the need for fundamental constitutional reform.
Most importantly, it would force into being in Tobago the exercise of real politics instead of the submissive government and the absence of politics that were made into real staples of Tobagonian life under London's administration.
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