Gail Alexan­der

The Op­po­si­tion PNM must wake up and "smell the cof­fee" that some­thing is very, very wrong in the par­ty, af­ter Mon­day's lo­cal gov­ern­ment de­feat which was the PNM's worst in 23 years, PNM's Colm Im­bert has said. The Diego Mar­tin North East MP said the sit­u­a­tion clear­ly had to do with the fact that as­cen­sion by new leader Kei­th Row­ley has not sunk in to the ex­tent of mak­ing peo­ple want to vote PNM. The PP's Garvin Nicholas who nar­row­ly lost Diego Mar­tin North East seat in the May 24 gen­er­al elec­tion, has, how­ev­er, point­ed to the ex­ten­sive work he did in the area for that elec­tion. PP of­fi­cials have at­trib­uted the par­ty's suc­cess to this.

Im­bert, mean­while, spoke yes­ter­day in dis­miss­ing the per­cep­tion by some PN­Mites–in­clud­ing Diego Mar­tin Cen­tral chair­man Dr Joe Laquis that the ab­sence of MPs Im­bert and Amery Browne from the PNM cam­paign helped the par­ty lose its Diego Mar­tin foothold.

"Peo­ple are just seek­ing scape­goats–they don't want to face re­al­i­ty," Im­bert said. "PNM got more seats in the 1987 lo­cal gov­ern­ment poll–46 seats–af­ter crush­ing de­feat by the NAR's 33 to three gen­er­al elec­tion win. "PNM's de­feat has noth­ing to do with MPs. Peo­ple vote for lo­cal can­di­dates and cor­po­ra­tions, not MPs. "What ap­pears to have hap­pened is the resid­ual an­ti-PNM sen­ti­ment and mo­men­tum from the May 24 gen­er­al poll made it tough for the PNM and ob­vi­ous­ly that's why the PP called the lo­cal elec­tion so close af­ter the gen­er­al.

"But ob­vi­ous­ly we have to ex­am­ine our end and as­cer­tain why peo­ple re­moved the PNM lead­er­ship in cor­po­ra­tions like Ari­ma and San Fer­nan­do–not Diego Mar­tin alone. "So PNM has to face deep in­tro­spec­tion to fig­ure out what's go­ing on be­cause ob­vi­ous­ly we're not clear on this," Im­bert said. "I saw com­ments from the lead­er­ship and cam­paign man­agers that they were con­fi­dent en­ter­ing the elec­tion. But the truth is we have not done well and it is not serv­ing PNM well to say every­thing is hunky-do­ry. Be­cause it is not. "Clear­ly, it has to do with Row­ley's lead­er­ship and the fact that ac­sen­sion to this has not sunk in to the ex­tent to make enough peo­ple want to vote PNM. Maybe he hasn't been there long enough. A month or so may not be enough time for peo­ple to prop­er­ly as­sess. "But this is not the time to fool our­selves–that at­ti­tude will get PNM nowhere," he added.

Im­bert said he de­tect­ed a dis­tinct­ly for­eign at­mos­phere in the UNC/PP's cam­paign­ing, deep­er than what ob­tained for gen­er­al elec­tion. He said while the PNM al­ways got good feed­back on walk­a­bouts, he felt the UNC was us­ing a new tech­nique. "It's not sim­ply the par­ty-in-pow­er syn­drome be­cause diehard PNM vot­ers don't usu­al­ly change for hand­outs or Black­Ber­rys," he said. "We have to un­der­stand the so­ci­ety bet­ter. We don't at this point. We're out of touch." Asked who was to blame, Im­bert said: "Ob­vi­ous­ly every­body's to blame. The on­ly way the cur­rent lead­er­ship can take the par­ty for­ward is if they face re­al­i­ty."

Asked if the PNM could go for­ward un­der Row­ley, he added: "It can if he faces the re­al­i­ty. At this time I think he needs to re­ceive a fair amount of time for peo­ple to see he will ac­cept we have deep fun­da­men­tal prob­lems and that the PNM's lead­er­ship style has to be­come more open, em­brac­ing, less ag­gres­sive, more de­mo­cat­ic and more will­ing to lis­ten to cit­i­zens."