Ac­cord­ing to Geisha Kow­lessar-Alon­zo’s re­port­ing in the Guardian last Mon­day, new PNM Po­lit­i­cal Leader Pen­ne­lope Beck­les-Robin­son said the fol­low­ing at a PNM meet­ing in Philip­pine, south Trinidad, the day be­fore:

“One com­mon thread is that the lead­er­ship be­came dis­con­nect­ed from the mem­ber­ship. An­oth­er com­mon thread is that we were not lis­ten­ing and the oth­er one was the fact that they saw mem­bers of the lead­er­ship on­ly around elec­tion.” (Guardian, p 5).

Lead­er­ship dis­con­nect­ed from the mem­ber­ship and mem­bers of the lead­er­ship on­ly turn­ing up around elec­tion time are symp­to­matic of the deep­er prob­lem which is “not lis­ten­ing”.

This kind of bru­tal self-analy­sis of the PNM’s de­feat by its new po­lit­i­cal leader may be re­quired for it to re­build, how­ev­er, the bruis­ing is not over just yet. For­mer po­lit­i­cal leader Kei­th Row­ley is keep­ing his Face­book page very ac­tive in is­su­ing mes­sages in re­sponse to state­ments be­ing made by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar.

What is hap­pen­ing is that the pop­u­la­tion is “lis­ten­ing” to two ver­sions of PNM mes­sag­ing–one from the of­fi­cial Op­po­si­tion and the oth­er from the Face­book page of the for­mer po­lit­i­cal leader.

There is a lot em­a­nat­ing from the PNM, some of­fi­cial and some un­of­fi­cial, as the var­i­ous slates con­tin­ue to cam­paign for the in­ter­nal elec­tions of the par­ty that cul­mi­nate to­day with votes be­ing cast by reg­is­tered PNM mem­bers to de­ter­mine their new ex­ec­u­tive.

Beck­les has cho­sen to take a side in this con­test even though she was re­turned un­op­posed as po­lit­i­cal leader. Some of the mem­bers on her One PNM slate were a part of the for­mer gov­ern­ment that lost the Gen­er­al Elec­tion on April 28. To whom was she re­fer­ring when she made her “not lis­ten­ing” com­ment?

Ex­act­ly what she meant by ac­cus­ing her col­leagues in the for­mer gov­ern­ment of “not lis­ten­ing” might have been best cap­tured by in­cum­bent Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary Fos­ter Cum­mings, who was record­ed on video at the same meet­ing in Philip­pine say­ing:

“We told you, we said to you, do not call any ear­ly elec­tion, we said that we begged and we plead­ed, do not put the PNM in a po­si­tion, save Trinidad and To­ba­go from Kam­la and her goons, and you wouldn’t lis­ten. And now be­cause we say lis­ten, we go­ing the de­mo­c­ra­t­ic way now, no anoint­ing, elec­tion by one man one vote, well we bad, okay. I didn’t come here to tell you this tonight you know, so let me just not tell you any­more tonight.”

That was quite a mouth­ful. This was the clear­est pub­lic ex­pres­sion from a se­nior of­fi­cial of the PNM that there was in­ter­nal di­vi­sion about whether or not to call an ear­ly gen­er­al elec­tion. Many knew al­ready they were go­ing to lose. So who was not lis­ten­ing?

The ear­ly dis­so­lu­tion of Par­lia­ment re­mains one of the mys­ter­ies of the last gen­er­al elec­tion. There was a pre­sump­tion that the new prime min­is­ter at the time, Stu­art Young, hav­ing been sworn in­to of­fice on March 17 was go­ing to at­tempt to gov­ern in the re­main­ing time avail­able up to Au­gust 27 be­fore Par­lia­ment would have to be dis­solved to build a track record of ser­vice to of­fer an al­ter­na­tive way from his pre­de­ces­sor as that record had be­come high­ly un­pop­u­lar.

It ap­peared that Row­ley’s orig­i­nal date of Sep­tem­ber 28 for the PNM con­ven­tion seemed to fit in­to such a time­line. In­stead, Young de­cid­ed that hav­ing be­come PM, his sec­ond ex­er­cise of pow­er in that of­fice (af­ter the Cab­i­net reshuf­fle) would be to dis­solve Par­lia­ment.

Was Young not lis­ten­ing? Ac­cord­ing to Kow­lessar-Alon­zo, Cum­mings al­so went on to say:

“Nine of us stood up and said if you do this we are go­ing to lose. Could you please not ush­er the PNM in­to op­po­si­tion? There were some oth­ers who were not in the nine who said so as well.”

We get from this state­ment by Cum­mings that nine peo­ple stood up and said no to an ear­ly elec­tion. The fact that he has sep­a­rat­ed these nine from “some oth­ers” who said the same thing pro­vides pause for thought. The on­ly oth­er time that the num­ber nine was sig­nif­i­cant was when the vote for a new PM was tak­en in To­ba­go on Jan­u­ary 6 and the re­sult was 11-9 with the nine vot­ing for Beck­les.

They all came to­geth­er even­tu­al­ly and signed a sin­gle let­ter to Pres­i­dent Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo pledg­ing their sup­port for Young to be­come the PM. The house that was di­vid­ed came to­geth­er to put Young in the PM’s chair. To whom were they “lis­ten­ing”?

Yet, it seemed Young was “not lis­ten­ing” when he went ahead and ad­vised the Pres­i­dent to dis­solve Par­lia­ment. He thought he would win.

Prof Hamid Ghany is Pro­fes­sor of Con­sti­tu­tion­al Af­fairs and Par­lia­men­tary Stud­ies at The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI). He was al­so ap­point­ed an Hon­orary Pro­fes­sor of The UWI up­on his re­tire­ment in Oc­to­ber 2021. He con­tin­ues his re­search and pub­li­ca­tions and al­so does some teach­ing at The UWI.