Rowley as asset or liability: a likely worry

Editorial
trinidadexpress.com

The rumbling and the tumbling in the atmosphere signals general elections, coming at us with the inexorability of a season, environmental or festive. Christmas, that festive season, is coming too. For which, Housing Minister Roodal Moonilal has promised non-stop distribution of State-supplied houses right up to December.
The election season is set to keep busting out all over, as T&T gears up for the climactic moment of choosing from the brands of political product on offer. Here, we do things in an ever bigger way.
The spread being unveiled by the People’s Partnership administration looks all-inclusive enough to cover both house and land. In 13 areas of east, south and central Trinidad, leases are being readied for handover to the landless, suddenly no longer the luckless.
Voters will see and hear the administration denounced for leasing Chaguaramas land to super-rich investors and developers. The answer being readied is that houses and lands are also being bestowed on people with neither shelter nor homesteads of their own making.
Certainly, the campaign will be about more than house and land. More than laptops for schoolchildren, roads, bridges and highways around the country, and the iconic box drains, the interrogation will be unrelenting: what have they done with all those billions?
The five-year record of the Partnership, pockmarked by mishaps and misadventures enough to summon suspicious attention, already attracts Opposition lightning and thunder. It is thunder that will be harnessed and projected by the PNM, once again to be acknowledged as the most deadly force in opposition.
As always, the PNM remains the national fall-back position. With its four decades in office, the PNM identifies as the default electoral option. Once again, the party’s outreach communicates the message that there’s nowhere else to turn.
After 1970, when the party had governed the country toward revolutionary tumult, mutiny, and riot, Prime Minister Dr Eric Williams proposed to the electorate a choice between the PNM and bacchanal. Since by then the troubles had been defused, Dr Williams was characterising the political opposition as perennial sources of chaos.
We cannot promise to take you to heaven, he said, but I can assure you they will take you to hell. Inside the party he founded, and among successor leaders, however, historian Williams has left no legacy of fervour for history. The lease of the Chaguaramas Convention Centre and adjacent land stirs only ersatz enthusiasm for recalling the Eric Williams glory days. Championing Independence, and claiming the peninsula for a sovereign national patrimony: that heroic era is more treasured today by people outside the party than in.
Still, the climactic electoral choice unfailingly presents itself as the PNM or Something Else. Five years ago, that Something Else was the wondrous formation of the People’s Partnership.
Popular expression took the form of the crossed forearms of one Percy expressively raised in the face of Patrick Manning, and the chutney refrain of “Go Nah”. For one gilded, but giddy, moment, a national majority persuaded itself that the Partnership, led by Kamla Persad-Bissessar, marked the promising start of something new.
The years since have been marked by the rhetorical and other about-turns induced by disillusion, but by little interrogation of the degree of shared responsibility for what had been wrought in the name of the Partnership.
For one schooled in the thinking of the radicalised 1970s, “new politics” could not for me lightly attach to the Congress of the People that helped form the Partnership. Immediately upon electoral victory, the COP people were assigned key Cabinet portfolios—Finance, Planning, Energy, among them. They would shortly figure in the high-cost juggling and ceaseless turnover of people that have been the hallmarks of Persad-Bissessar personnel management.
Fast forward to 2015, by when the non-stop trickle of withdrawals of enthusiasm and defections by COP people have swollen into a flood. Still, political leader Prakash Ramadhar may act as Prime Minister, signifying at least formalistic recognition of the COP’s Partnership standing.
Even as the COP elements identifying with Mr Ramadhar have stayed put inside the coalition, the rising tide of COP dissidents until now has remained a stagnant pool. It has thus taken five years for the disenchanted to constitute something called the Alliance of Independents which, if not destined to be a now-for-now election party, will presumably remain a platform of promise to do something tomorrow.
All of which eventually confirms for elections 2015 the familiar choice of the PNM or Something Else, the latter recognisably the Persad-Bissessar-led Partnership. This close to voting day, however, it is the political well-being and marketability of leader Keith Rowley that present a cause for concern in PNM minds.
The Prime Minister’s off-the-wall tactic of bringing a parliamentary no-confidence motion against the Opposition Leader appears to have some destabilising effect. Fitzgerald Hinds calls it a “feeble attempt to embarrass” Dr Rowley. The party has, nevertheless, taken it seriously enough to bestir a “Rally Round Rowley” movement.
It’s too early to assess whether, at the big 2015 moment for the PNM or Something Else, the leader’s status could devalue from asset to liability. But not too early to worry.

 

[quote author=Chin link=topic=96486.msg625561#msg625561 date=1426466258]

His own party faithful claims he is to dark in complexion... 

Kamla will put a beating on Rowley...
[/quote]

what sort of idiotically informed comment is that! ::LOL::

is chin the racist personality in socafighter's bunch ::confused::

not that the others are any better relatively > > >

I cyar read dat one paragraph jumbled, indecipherable phuckery > > > >

this is bettah:

Quote:Judge not by colour
I know there are many people in the country who think that Keith Rowley is too black to be Prime Minister. I didn’t need Fitzgerald Hinds to tell me that, although his charge that such sentiment emanates from the bowels of the PNM, from important persons in the party, did surprise me somewhat.

I don’t know why we bury our heads in the sand when the issue of colour prejudice, which is often linked to race prejudice, rears its ugly head in the society. It has always been there, and, I imagine, it always will be. Most people of lighter or whiter complexion, whatever their ethnicity, believe they are superior to others who are dark-skinned, or worse, black. But let me explain why I state categorically that there are people who believe that Rowley is too black to lead the country.

Ever since he emerged in the front rank of the PNM, but more so since he assumed leadership of the party in the wake of its electoral defeat in 2010, I have heard many Indians or fair-skinned persons of mixed, sometimes dubious race, say, “Rowley too damn racial!” On several occasions when such statement was made to me or in my presence, I asked the accusers, “Why do you say that? Can you point to an instance in which he showed racism?” Invariably, those making the wild charges would be stumped, unable to adduce one shred of evidence to support their allegations.

“Well...well...well,” they would mutter. “Well, what?” I would ask. “Why do you say he is racial?” “Well, he looks that way! Too besides, he crude! And (Patrick) Manning call him a Rottweiler!”

Now, I am not talking about one or two persons: I am talking about scores, in different locations, at different times, but mostly after he became leader of the PNM, and within recent time, a candidate for Prime Minister. Interestingly, there were some very black people among them, but that did not surprise me. You need to read Frantz Fanon to understand why some black people hate their own.

In the scenarios I described above, I deduced that these people detested Rowley based on two factors. First, he is black...very black (don’t give me the dark-skinned bull). Second, he leads the PNM, a party that many people love to hate, some with good reason, others without rhyme or reason. On this latter score, if there is one man in this country who should go to his grave with hatred for the PNM, it would be me. Based on my revolutionary convictions and my involvement in the events of 1970, and the fact that to this day there are PNM fanatics and racists who believe I should be dead for my role then, I should hate them and their party. But I don’t. I treat the PNM as I would any other political party: I belong to none, I jealously guard my independence, and I insist on my right to give praise where it’s due or criticism when necessary.

I have known Rowley as a government minister with whom I needed to interact, and as a politician with whom I sometimes had civil conversation. And not once then, nor indeed since, have I had cause to believe he is ‘racial’. If I did, I would pounce on him like the proverbial tonne of bricks. However, I know too many fair-skinned creoles and ‘red people’ who, while they may mix with blacks, will never accept them as leaders—political, institutional or corporate. And I know too many Indians who would be very upset with their sons or daughters who are in relationships with black Indians (yes, there are many black Indians: black is a colour, not a race) or Africans.

But the aforementioned hypocrites would easily embrace whiter-shades-of-pale of inferior stature or intellect or looks as leaders or as sons or daughters-in-law. Ah lie?

Admittedly, such prejudices are personal matters. People have the right to determine who their friends and in-laws are, just as they have the right to be racists. What they must never be allowed to do is get away with the hypocrisy of denying their prejudices when they are caught out. Watch how many of them who will never support the PNM even if a ‘maharaja’ is leading the party, are campaigning against Rowley because he is blacker than Penny Beckles, because they do not want him as Prime Minister.

As for the PNM faithful and its financiers who are similarly inclined, maybe their prejudice is understandable. The party never had someone as black as Rowley as its leader. Dr Eric Williams was brown, George Chambers was a ‘red man’, and Patrick Manning brown. However, leadership of the PNM is PNM business, not mine, not yours. I have heard some party people charge that Rowley has grown arrogant since he assumed leadership, that he does not acknowledge loyalists who have remained faithful during lean times, that he has his own cabal. If hubris has set in before the prize, he will pay the ultimate price. But for humanity’s sake, do not judge the man by his colour.

[quote author=Chin link=topic=96486.msg625604#msg625604 date=1426505695]
When Proof is before you ...you cant read....it figures

If I quote I am racist ....It fits your agenda/motive .... ::LOL:: ::LOL::
[/quote]

ah shut to eff up chin.  I know all ah dat..like the back of mih han'

its wat yuh original comment said about you.  how yuh say it reflected your own opinion on the issue which  has been clear from day one.  dat is wat I commented on..wat I meant.

I know the stinkin' west indians when it comes to race..black west indians in particular, self hatin' MC an dem.  de region is rotten to the core and internal racism is one reason. so who go come and tell me about west indian racism now..you, a west indian of 'high' skin color like you...the worst offenders of all ::confused:: ::confused::
dont be ridiculous! > > >