Importance of the Tobago voter

It's going to be a busy year for the voting public of Tobago, who face a general election on April 28, and the election for the Tobago House of Assembly's (THA) representatives later this year.

The House of Representatives is currently composed of 21 PNM MPs to the UNC's 19.

Some of those electoral districts are largely spoken for, but the two Tobago seats have proven to be critical to the successful formation of a government, and the PNM faces a fight.

Seven parties have announced they will field candidates for Tobago East and Tobago West, currently held by Ayanna Webster-Roy and Shamfa Cudjoe-Lewis, respectively.

The parties that have announced plans to field candidates to unseat the incumbent PNM are Watson Duke's Progressive Democratic Party, Mickela Panday's Patriotic Front, Farley Augustine's Tobago People's Party (TPP), Dr Denise Tsoiafatt-Angus' Innovative Democratic Alliance (IDA), Nikocy Phillips' Unity of the People and Gary Griffith's National Transformation Alliance (NTA).

Newsday's reporting on the ground among Tobagonians suggests that its electorate has hard questions for both the PNM and TPP, and new faces will have to be uncommonly persuasive to be able to even hold on to their deposits. The PNM and TPP have had an active role in the management of the island's affairs, but neither has acquitted itself to the extent that they can hope to rely on past glories.

In 1976, ANR Robinson's Democratic Action Congress (DAC) came to power in Tobago and found itself dramatically positioned in 1986 to change the government.

The party that came closest to replicating that groundbreaking success was Ashworth Jack's Tobago Organisation of the People (TOP), a breakaway faction of the DAC that won four seats in the 2009 THA election, then won the two Tobago seats in the 2010 general election, forming a coalition with the People's Partnership.

By 2013, the Tobago electorate had soured on the TOP and the party lost by a landslide against the PNM slate in that year's THA election, then bottomed out after it lost both seats to PNM candidates in the 2015 general election.

At issue in 2015, indeed, at issue generally in any Tobago election, is the question of representation and parity for the island in its relationship with Trinidad.

For that reason, any party hoping to make political inroads in Tobago will have to do so on terms dictated by its voter base. Chief among them is the question of autonomy.

Apart from the issues of self-governance that have rankled Tobagonians for decades, a political party asking for a Tobago vote must demonstrate, unequivocally, that they intend to be Tobago-first in their outlook and ambitions.

Any candidate who doesn't get that right will stand no chance in Tobago.