I am the best candidate

The election was originally scheduled to take place today, but it has been postponed after a threat of legal action from COP member Kirt Francis was brought to the fore in relation to the candidacy of Nicole Dyer-Griffith, former leader of the Alliance of Independents.

The leadership poll has been postponed pending the outcome of the party’s assembly on July 23, which will allow for the election of a new national executive.

After that meeting, a new date for the leadership election will be set.

Former COP chairman and San Fernando West MP Carolyn Seepersad-Bachan is also vying for the party’s leadership.

Gopaul-Mc Nicol said she was ready, willing and able to contest the election whenever the new date is announced.

She said her first priority, if elected, will be to form a new national executive, comprising people whom she feels are committed to building the internal structures of the party and reinforcing its values and vision.

“I believe the COP still has the best policies in education, social transformation and energy. There is no luxury in dismissing the COP as a third party,” she said in a Sunday Newsday interview.

No stranger to politics, Gopaul-McNicol is a former COP deputy political leader who bought in to the party’s philosophy when it was first conceptualised by founder Winston Dookeran in 2006.

Gopaul-McNicol believes, however, the COP quickly shifted from its moorings and became more in line with the dictates of the United National Congress- led People’s Partnership government after the 2010 general election, a development for which it is yet to recover.

“It was supposed to have been ground support which would have been 50 per cent and media, the other 50 per cent. But it ended up 80 per cent media and 20 per cent on the ground.” She said by the time attorney Prakash Ramadhar assumed the leadership of the party after Dookeran’s departure in 2011, it was more of the same.

Saying the situation did not augur well for “permanency in membership”, Gopaul-Mc Nicol said a re-configured COP, under her stewardship, will forge intimate ties with the people.

“You have to go door to door, know the constituents by their first name.” The St Joseph’s Convent, St Joseph, alumnus believes it is up to her to reverse the fortunes of the COP at a time when the country is crying out for a fresh, bottom-up to governance.

“I have to make it happen now and then, once I become the leader of the COP, what is going to happen is that the nation is going to be transfixed into how we change this country to address the problem. We have four years to do it.” But don’t expect to hear Gopaul-Mc Nicol bad-mouthing the ruling the People’s National Movement government at every turn.

She said there was simply too much work to be done.

“We don’t have the luxury to play opposition politics with our country. I have to work along with my new executive with our Government to help because you can’t say you’re in opposition and want to see your country go down, so let the PNM lose.

“It eh no PNM I am dealing with. It is the Government of Trinidad and Tobago.” Gopaul-McNicol, who fought unsuccessfully the St Joseph seat for the PNM in the 2002 general election, is advocating a transformational approach to governance as opposed to the transactional model, she believes, has been standard fare for decades.

“Transactional politics says you give me this and I will give you some contracts.

You give me votes and I will give you contracts,” she said.

“But we need people who are going beyond the politics. The politics is wrong. It has been top-down for so long that people are not even looking at our communities and seeing what is happening.” For example, she observed the policies have been fuelling criminal tendencies in many of the country’s young people, focussing, it appeared, on those proficient in academia.

However, she says, “The genius of the artiste, sportsman, musician, are no different than the genius of the academic. They are equally intelligent, just manifested differently