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By Raffique Shah
June 16, 2024
Long before I considered writing a column about the election inside the United Nations General Assembly, I made a conscious decision to focus not on individual candidates but rather on the electoral process. In a democracy like ours, the backbone of political parties is always composed of a few interest groups that have little disagreement on key issues such as economic policy, crime and punishment, and education.
In fact, if you didn’t know the individuals running for office, you would think they were “fringe buddies” who trolled each other in small talk.The struggle within UNC is between Kamla Persad-Bissessar, who has been leading since she kicked Basdeo Panday out of contention for any office in the run-up to the 2010 elections, and her loyal supporters, after they seemed to have fallen out.
In past battles for the UNC leadership and other key positions, the rhetoric between the two sides has reached an almost hostile level. In most cases, the candidates competing with the leadership team did not have good relations after the leadership won and were almost excluded from the small elite of the party and then from the cabinet. Therefore, it is impossible for me to write about the internal elections of the UNC without delving into the autocrats masquerading as democrats.
Therein lies the fallacy about our form of government, what kind of system the majority of citizens want, and brings us back to square one: the people get the government they deserve.
Let me review a little about the hierarchy of UNC, which was Basdeo Panday’s third attempt to have a political party.
Now, among the thousands of Indians who gathered in the pampas of Aranjuez, there were tens of thousands who came together to form a party that was shaped and molded by Pandey’s own hands, when it was possible to form a truly democratic organization. Remember, these thousands who gathered, as all those who were present in Aranjuez boast to this day, and the apostles of Pandey agree, few of them had ever seen the document (the constitution and presumably the policies and programs). So, they did not know what they were born into, only that Pandey was their leader and that what came out of his mouth were commandments that Jesus Humphrey blessed with his divine light.
It was also on that fateful day in 1988 that they sacrificed the unity under the leadership of ANR Robinson and the NAR that put them in command for the first time since the Indians came here so long ago.
I don’t know who did it. Pandey told me that Robinson wanted to control the hordes of Indians who swept the vote in the 1986 election by a margin of 33 to 3. Ray Robinson told me that Pandey pushed an agenda with a strong Indian tinge, while “that Humphrey,” who seemed to be Pandey’s spiritual leader, promoted the idea of the Trinity Dollar.
“My government has never been so embarrassed,” Ray exclaimed, and I had never seen him so emotional. We were sitting in a feature booth in Whitehall. “But you know Humphrey is obsessed with the Trinity,” I said.
I raised my hand to signal for permission to speak. “Not only did he design the Trinity, but we had four leaders in the United Labor Front—George Weeks, Pandy, Joe Young, and me. So he cleverly cut Young’s head off the portrait, leaving only the Holy Trinity, and I, the agnostic, completed the Trinity.”
But I knew nothing about politics and never really got into it. In 1975, when the ULF was formed, some of us dreamed of a collective leadership of three to thirty not-so-bright people who would surely be better than a dictator. But the problem was, the masses wanted a dictator. They demanded it. We won ten seats with that formula, wiped out all other opposition, and entered Parliament with Basdeo Pandey, the premier, to lead us into a new era in Parliament, but they refused. They demanded Pandey to be the supreme leader.
I quietly stepped aside and stepped down, out the door where the old SDLP and other P parties continued to rule. Because of Panday, Humphrey and others, the new politics died before it was born.
As I write this, I have no idea how the UNC internal election will turn out. They are voting today. Kamra will most likely continue as an incompetent leader by default, as the members will happily vote for the opposition forever. There is nothing left to write about the UNC internally. The few who have been given meaningless titles will continue to support her.
The stench of rotting flesh is what UNC left behind…
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