It is said that if you live long enough you will see and experience everything. First, it was former Prime Minister Patrick Manning holding news conferences and telling the newly and legitimately elected government to resign and call fresh elections; now it is the other former prime minister, Basdeo Panday, who says he is about to mount a political campaign to take back the UNC from Kamla Persad-Bissessar and various other "Johnnys-come-lately." Now nearing his 80th birthday and nearly two years after his protégé, Mrs Persad-Bissessar, toppled him from his seemingly impregnable position at the head of the UNC, Mr Panday still has not been able to come to terms with the stark and bitter reality of his comprehensive defeat by someone he considers a neophyte.
He must also still have it in for Jack Warner who provided the money, guidance and political cunning that allowed Mrs Persad-Bissessar to defeat Mr Panday in the January 2010 UNC internal election. Interestingly though, Warner, who is now in a weakened position in Cabinet and party, did not figure directly in Mr Panday's condemnation. There may be the makings of a plan of rapprochement with the former FIFA vice president. If Mr Warner could have assisted Mrs Persad-Bissessar to lead Mr Panday to the political cemetery, then surely he is capable of flipping the script. Stranger things have happened in local politics, which, as the nation has been told, has a morality of its own, and in which yesterday is yesterday and today is today.
Visualise if you may: Basdeo, Ramesh, Jack and a few others backed by the social underclass which was Mr Panday's base, and you approach the possibility of the development of sufficient of a bloc support for Mr Panday's challenge. From that point it may not seem like too much of a possibility to go on, but we have a very fluid political environment here which changes every two to three weeks. On the other hand it must be said too that with the UNC in power as effectively the ruling party, the base of UNC supporters who have been entrenched, is not likely to want to do anything that could allow the power to slip from under the rising sun. However, if we read Mr Panday's pitch at this point, it is directed at those elements of the UNC base that have not gained contracts, board directorships, high positions in government and state enterprises.
This may be an attempt to rally the dispossessed and those who are uncomfortable with the need to share the fruits of coalition government. Unfortunately, but very typically, Mr Panday does not lay down a solid argument as to why and how the UNC has not achieved for its supporters and the country. What however is beginning to emerge is the sub-text: play on emotional feelings of the masses, on the feeling of being left in the cold while having laid the base for the UNC to gain office, and raise the red flag of "outsiders" coming to take over the party and to effectively leave the core base out.
What can be said of Mr Panday's plans, his determination to get Kamla Persad-Bissessar out from her position of power and to reclaim the party that he considers his own? First off, Mr Panday should not be allowed to call out Mrs Persad-Bissessar on the basis of what he has often referred to as a "stolen election." He has never provided the evidence to substantiate this claim. Second, if he really feels he has a right to retake the UNC he must come up with substantive reasons for doing so. Third, Mr Panday must come clean on his ambitions if he were to achieve the downfall of Mrs Persad-Bissessar and her PP Government. No one will believe that he has no further ambitions in the political establishment. If he does not, he is no more than an old political warrior who does not know when he is beaten...or how to make a graceful exit.