Out of the picture

I decide to cease my cleaning to sit awhile and contemplate the picture: I am captivated by the scene from the past, by this photo which turns out is one taken at the 1995 UNC rally in the Aranguez Savannah, two days before that year’s historic general election in November. In the image, a much younger UNC leader Basdeo Panday is on the platform and standing room is all that’s left on a stage packed with party financiers, strategists from Canada and the US, local organisers and candidates. On the ground before and below Panday, there is no standing room at all to be found among the thousands — or so it seems — of flag and banner waving supporters, most of whom are wearing bright UNC T-shirts. There are bunches of colourful balloons everywhere on the stage over which hangs a spectacularly large Rising Sun, the party’s emblem.

I’m not sure who took the photograph, but I’m amazed at how completely it captures the mood of that Saturday in 1995. I should know because I was there in Aranguez that afternoon, having been assigned by Newsday to cover the rally. Those were what can only be described as the UNC’s halcyon days: it was an era when the party’s sun was truly on the rise. Back then, the party had money and support and Panday was God or at least on his way to being one. Everyone was energetic. Oh and happy. The UNC loved the media in those times and that Saturday afternoon the media, atop its own platform was presented with gifts of UNC copybooks, T-shirts, pens and more. It was a heady mix of rum and roti and US politics.

Nothing like nowadays. Nowadays, digital photographs show depressing images of tiny pockets of woebegone supporters in classrooms around the country, slouched in chairs listening listlessly to the party leadership beg for votes. Financiers and organisers have for the most part beat a retreat, as have many of the MPs who stood that November afternoon on that Aranguez platform and bashed the PNM on behalf of the UNC. There are no large crowds to dance to Bob Marley’s "One Love," as there were that Saturday. There is no reason for jigs or for flag-waving because there is no money to pay the piper and there is more hate than love in the air. There is not so much as a whiff of rum or roti and the American advisers who helped with the 1995 campaign are ancient history.

I wonder though if it is scenes, such as the one in this 1995 photograph in my hand, which in Basdeo Panday’s case are preserved not on film, but etched in his brain, that keep Basdeo Panday today holding onto the reigns of a party such to squeeze the life out of it. I don’t know what it’s like to stand before adoring multitudes and give speeches which are greeted by ecstatic cries. Most of us don’t, but surely that extent of power has to prove intoxicating. The urge to have another and another taste of it must be overwhelming. How else does one make sense of Panday’s conduct? The problem for Panday is that he’s not going to taste power again, not in that intensity and it’s a reality he cannot face.

I also wonder when next again in Trinidad and Tobago we will see such vibrant political days, when we will live in times when there is an alternative to the PNM as there should be. We don’t really have an Opposition, a Government in waiting, do we? Even if Basdeo Panday steps down now and hands over to Winston Dookeran or to Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj for that matter, it doesn’t seem possible for any type of UNC, old or new, united or broken, to be ready to contest the 2007 with any energy, far less beat the PNM. There will be no sunny Opposition rally in the 2007 election.

The PNM Government can look forward to being the only party in town for what may be quite a while, despite the high murder toll and inflation and their uncontrollable ascent.

Little wonder the Cuban doctors have found the Prime Minister’s ticker ticking strong. It won’t miss a beat, not while Patrick Manning hasn’t a worry in the world, not when he can count on those on the other side, on Opposition Leader Basdeo Panday and UNC leader Winston Dookeran to keep him exactly where he is, which for the moment is White Hall. Apart or together, this modern day Don Quixote and his Sancho Panza who are promising to ride around the country and slay the dragons of poverty and crime, are good for the PM’s image because despite Manning’s own tendency to shove his foot into his mouth, many voters no longer believe or care what the UNC leadership has to say. The Prime Minister and his PNM score higher on the credibility scale. It doesn’t matter what Panday says now. The UNC is now united, he declares? Who believes this story and who gives a hoot save a handful of hangers-on?

Time, I conclude, real and political, as I put the photo in my bag to take to the office, has been kinder to Patrick Manning than it has been to Basdeo Panday. And images like the scene from 1995 are the perfect picture, the one which paints those thousand words that eventually tell the complete story.

suz@itrini.com