UNC constituency elections in 2005

THE OPPOSITION UNC will hold constituency executive elections throughout Trinidad and Tobago sometime in the first quarter of 2005. This was disclosed yesterday by UNC chairman Wade Mark. Mark told Newsday that the party’s national executive recently decided that it will hold executive elections in all 36 constituencies early next year and this will lay the foundation for the national executive elections to follow later on. The UNC was due to hold its national executive elections in September but this was delayed due to the laying of an Elections and Boundaries Commission (EBC) report in Parliament which proposed increasing the number of constituencies in TT from 36 to 41.

Opposition Leader Basdeo Panday said the UNC had postponed these elections in light of the report because the party was not sure of its implications and needed to study it in depth. Some UNC MPs have claimed that the increased number of constituencies would favour the PNM in future general elections. While Panday’s post will not be up for grabs in the UNC’s internal polls, the party is to decide on who will fill three, newly-created deputy political leader positions. UNC sources have claimed that MPs Ganga Singh, Winston Dookeran and Kamla Persad-Bissessar are tipped to fill those posts.

Dookeran was at one time considered to be Panday’s likely successor when rumours were being circulated about the UNC leader’s imminent exit from the political stage after the UNC’s 2002 electoral defeat to the PNM. Panday has expressed his desire to retire from active politics at age 70 but has also indicated that he would not leave the UNC vulnerable to political predators, identifying his former deputy leader Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj as one such individual. Maharaj has said he is not interested in returning to the UNC in its present form and if the nation does not accept the new political party he is trying to form, he would bow out of active politics in 2007.