By Raffique Shah
February 15, 2025
It seems that some fifth columnist in the ranks of the Opposition United National Congress has hijacked the party’s offices and is training its activists and the leader, I need add for emphasis, in how to lose another election. The PNM in government was always destined to be beaten halfway to death in the run-up to the polls. It happens every five years—or if you can mastermind consecutive victories, in ten years.
Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley has the formula to win two consecutive elections, and he is likely to add a third notch to his war weapon before the dust settles later this year. But Mrs Kamla Persad-Bissessar has left her fate blowing in the wind, this way, that way, landing the party in trouble with some members of its support base making her life easier, but killing her apostles—not so softly, even cruelly.
To lose to the PNM in the upcoming election is much easier for just over half the Trinidad population that’s against the PNM on any given polling day. It is easier to lose than to win against the PNM. But the conditions for an upset loom large as the last five years marched ineluctably. Dr Rowley seemed to have decided to not risk losing an election. If PNM went down, Minister Stuart Young could always take the blame, and should they win…
But seriously, the PNM has lost a significant part of its strength in the urban black communities because of trying times for the economy which were almost inevitable, it matters not who was in power. To Dr Rowley’s credit, he and Young worked around the clock at times to recover some lost ground in a business that was always critical to the success or failure of the national economy.
I should add that from my personal knowledge of the oil and gas sector (which I covered extensively when I wrote for the Express Business), I knew that consuming natural gas to fuel downstream energy plants as well as to satisfy a ready market for liquefied natural gas (we were a small country, but a big player), we just did not have the required 3.5 billion cubic feet per day.
Also, any journalist covering gas will have known that our reserves of both fuels were running low. Once you knew these facts—and they were facts—you would have been very disturbed as a citizen over such limitations. I remember, too, pestering the gas brass for information that would show upward movement in the Loran-Manatee fields, in which we had significant shares but which did not seem to be moving anywhere.
I still follow trends that these and other large cross-border deposits of hydrocarbons generate because I know the importance to our economy.
The agreements that the PM and Minister Young reached with countries such as Venezuela, which owns one of the top ten oil and gas reserves in the world, must be of critical interest to any patriot. If you are not a patriot then you would want to see them fail. This for me was the tone emanating from the highest levels of the UNC, with its leader throwing her support behind the now politically deceased Juan Guaidó.
In countries such as ours that experienced the long, at times cruel, clutch of colonialism, many nationals know the difference between politics and sleeping with the enemy. In politics we hit hard anywhere it hurts, but when you sleep with the enemy, you are nothing less than a whore, and that is what people remember about you.
I was saying (before I was lengthily interrupted by the shenanigans of a party that never knew common courtesies and goodwill among citizens), whatever one’s party allegiance may be, you must draw a line that you never step beyond, however nasty your internal political fights may be. Another astute leader of a party with a base as significant as the UNC will have studied how to expand that and convert it into a voting majority that won’t leave you facing the media with some allies that look like river fish tied on a string waiting to be gutted, deep-fried and saanayed.
If Persad-Bissessar and the UNC lose this next election, she and her minions will have worked damn hard to alienate large numbers of voters who had broken ranks with the PNM on issues they knew no party could have resolved given the economic and social issues we have faced for the last 20 years.
Crime is wild in many countries. While the murder rate is, well, murderous, it is almost commonplace among many countries. I think a government that was serious would have bitten into it maybe as far back as 30 years ago, but nobody wanted to swallow that bitter zebapique concoction.