Chance for a new start

ARTHUR NURSE

THE ROUTING of the PNM in the Tobago House of Assembly (THA) elections earlier this year clearly shows that financier-driven politics can be soundly defeated once a political party can convince the populace that it truly has its interests at heart.

It is exceedingly important, however, that a political party be grounded in every community in which it hopes to have influence. Certainly that must be the case in those communities that comprise the electorate that it believes it can most easily influence. That is the nature of politics.

However, the intention – from the start – should always be to reach out to all communities in order to get their input for deriving policy that makes for successful national development. In a multi-ethnic country like TT, such a strategy is essential.

Those who would seek to lead us must be men and women of overarching vision, not just politicians. But even visionary men and women of good intention can see their best-laid plans go awry, if the political party does not have organisational structures that can truly inform their elected leaders and put them in check when necessary.

Sometimes the elected leaders are happy to have functionally weak structures, for this affords them complete power. In such a scenario party groups are of importance only at election time. In-between elections the leaders and party financiers hold all the power.

As politics tends to attract a lot of self-seekers, many people in the party groups are unwilling to “rock the boat” for fear they may lose whatever benefits they have or seek. They are willing to accept no water in their taps and pot-holed roads. They are unwilling to call out corruption. Rather, they seek their piece of the action.

I have seen first-hand how the rot sets in. When I was a young teenager my father was one of the lieutenants who helped put the PNM in power in the constituency of which Belmont was a part. (I still keep my party youth group card as a memento.) The constituency representative, Donald Granado – minister of labour in the first PNM government – would visit our home. My father had a good job and did not need to seek benefits, but even he let a lot of slackness go unreported and unreprimanded.

By the time I left Trinidad in 1967 I was already disillusioned. Therefore the 1970 Black Power Revolution did not come as a surprise. When I first visited Independence Square on my return in 1976 and saw all the shacks, and was hit with the pervasive smell of faeces and urine, I thought that the leaders of the country had surely lost their minds. And Belmont was still having water problems.

The Progressive Democratic Patriots (PDP) and any other new party have the chance of giving the country a new start. But they must learn from the mistakes of their predecessors if they wish to make TT – what it once had the chance to be – the best developed small-island state in the world.