Self-destruct mode

At a public meeting called by the UNC on Monday evening, the party’s official leader Winston Dookeran was shut out, not being carded to speak, or even allowed a seat at the head table, while the newly returned black sheep to the fold, Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, was presented as the main attraction. It is quite clear that this strategy had been planned long before Mr Panday’s sentence was passed. So Mr Dookeran, who all along had been excusing his own reticence and inaction by saying he did not wish to deepen the split in the party, has now learned a public and humiliating lesson. He has no choice now but to quit the UNC, form or join a new political entity. Unfortunately for him, having failed to do so after being booed by a UNC crowd at the party’s rally earlier this year, his stocks as a political leader have now sunk to virtually zero.

And what about the UNC itself? The suspicion that Mr Maharaj was positioning himself to replace Mr Dookeran and even Mr Panday has now become fact, catalysed by Mr Panday’s conviction. That verdict has led to Mr Panday’s position as Opposition Leader being revoked yesterday by President Richards. But who from the UNC bench will replace him? There is no doubt that that choice is now spurring all kinds of machinations even within the faction that has taken over the UNC. Reports yesterday suggested that Kamla Persad Bissessar would succeed Mr Panday - a further insult to Mr Dookeran who as Political Leader would have been the automatic choice had he shown more gumption. It seems hopeless for Mr Dookeran to now try to get a majority of Opposition MPs to declare their support for him.

But, whoever becomes the party’s political leader or the Leader of the Opposition, it will not change the fact that the UNC now has little or no chance of winning the next general election. Blinded by their greed for power, the members of the “cabal”, (so scathingly dismissed by former UNC Minister Mervyn Assam on Monday night) have overlooked one overwhelming factor. Mr Panday has been jailed for failing to declare a bank account as required by the Integrity Act. His political career has therefore been ended because of the perception of corruption now made fact by the court. So what makes the principals trying to take over the party feel that they are immune to this taint? Apart from their public alignment with Mr Panday during the UNC infighting, consider some of the men who populated the head table on Monday evening: Vasant Bharath, better known to voters as “the dog rice man”; FIFA vice-president Jack Warner, who arranged for a local travel agency in which he had a proprietary interest to get exclusive rights to World Cup tickets; Wade Mark, master of unfounded allegations; and Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, the man whose insistence on integrity in public life brought down Panday’s government in 2001 but who apparently has forgotten and forgiven.

So what we have here is a group of persons who are putting themselves before their party, and putting their party before the country. Because, as we have pointed out ad nauseam, the nation’s democracy depends on having a strong Opposition party. At present, we do not have this, and that fact makes our eroding social foundation even more shaky.