Time to stop toeing party line

THE EDITOR: People are talking, from the street level right up to President’s House and the talk is that UNC MP Gillian Lucky is the only person with ballpower to clean-bowl maximum leader Basdeo Panday and send him to the pavilion for good. Imagine in a UNC dominated by males, the torchbearer to rally against maximum leadership has to be Ms Lucky, she indeed making a brave gesture which begs the immediate question: are the seemingly able-bodied men in the UNC related to some kind of eunuch clan?

Now this brings me to an issue we the people face in post-independence Trinidad and Tobago: should we or should we not embrace the decadent politics of the western world where morality and integrity are supplanted by expediency? My response is an emphatic NO and I publicly make an appeal to political thinkers to come forward and let’s have a debate on the topic: “Explain your political agenda and I’ll tell you who you are.” Let us have some one-on-one interviews like on BBC’s Hard Talk.

The time has come for us to bury this practice of slavishly “toeing the party line,” it is unprogressive, it discourages individual thought and it is my view that, when a political leader has lost his ability to win the hearts and minds of people (this and not immorality is the hallmark of great leaders), he should get out of politics. Therefore Panday’s statement that politics throws up its own morality and that there’s only expediency is an outdated cliche that belongs to old Europe when kings and dictators ruled. It is so uninspiring that one could see it as a dagger in the heart of Panday’s political career.

RONALD JOHN
Playwright/director
Port-of-Spain