By Raffique Shah
September 18, 2024

To listen to MP Rushton Paray tell his story, citizens who have lived through 15 years or more of political machinations will be excused for making out that he believes the hogwash he is spouting.

More than that, he appears to believe we will be convinced his is a political drama unparalleled in the history of the nation. Somebody or bodies should save Mr Paray from making an ox of himself.

It is not by accident that Trinis react to inter-party and intra-party fallouts with disdain since such conflicts never change the politics of the country. When he was questioned by a reporter on whether he expected any serious fallout from his challenge to the party’s leader, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, he responded, “No!” with a kind of confidence that will have us believe he is a messenger from Jah who we must treat with total respect.

I was quite surprised when I heard him tell the media he had joined the UNC a mere seven years earlier. I believe Mr Paray knows and genuinely believes he is still a favourite of the Opposition Leader. But you readers, and I, know Mr Paray is talking nonsense—unless he has some secret arrangement or agreement with Persad-Bissessar that will allow her to come out smelling like roses at a critical point in the upcoming election campaign.

For all his flair and “gift of the gab”, Mr Paray is a man marked for political death. He knows that I know of what I speak since I was the first casualty of the political leader of the opposition, then embodied in the nascent United Labour Front (ULF) which we idealists, back in 1975-76, saw as the answer to every political question that could be raised at that time.

That party, the ULF, was a dream that many young people still at school experienced near orgasmic trances as they thought of their future with this dream-ride as their chariot.

As a relatively new member of third or fourth opposition parties moulded by Bas, with artistry and graphics by the reliable Panday-ite John Humphrey, Paray will hardly know the depth of deviousness to which the human mind can sink. Humphrey invented the Trinity dollar that almost ended up as our national currency.

Mind you, Panday went along with it, but for the alertness of then-PM Ray Robinson and other senior members in the NAR Cabinet. It was almost like watching a new twist of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill’s Call Me Trinity—Dollar. These men were unbelievably wacky.

I don’t know if MP Paray was tutored by this duo before he joined the UNC and I’m not accusing him of being a mad-man, but he should be very wary spouting stupidness, passing it off as political and economic theories. I heard him tell the media he was too busy focusing on the direction the country should go.

If Paray believes he has answers to problems that no government so far has come close to solving, he must be a magician. If he had the answers all along, why are we bothering with the other politicians? Surely he must have, too, strategies for reining in crime, which we desperately need.

I must confess, I was very impressed with Mr Paray when he first appeared on the UNC’s political platform. His seeming depth of knowledge, he’s surprisingly articulate and he has not, to my knowledge, spouted naked lies to score political points, as so many of his colleagues routinely do.

But for all these positives that have shaped him into a potential leader, he will not be allowed to breathe the same air as Persad-Bissessar and her toadies. They have built The Great Wall Gobar around themselves and Persad-Bissessar. They believe the PNM is already dead and they will preside at its funeral. Big Mistake!

The only thing dead in this scenario is the Opposition Leader’s political career. The one she is intent on saving, no matter how many of her political allies and toadies she must throw under the proverbial bus to remain in this debacle that is our politics.

If Paray is serious about running for office, he must first learn to ignore the rantings of commentators like me. Every five years I take pleasure in riling politicians. We only do it once in five years, they do it to us every day.

Secure the best advisers that money can buy. Do not go near Humphrey, any Panday or the likes of them. Be committed enough to go it alone because you have no friends in politics. And, have fun, because citizens of this country are not serious about anything that matters.

How else yuh think we end up here?