Go quietly and quickly, Mr Manning
Former Prime Minister Patrick Manning
From the Trinidad Guardian
For Mr Manning to leave it up to the general council of the PNM to make the
decision on his future would be unacceptable….Read more….
Having called an election 30 months ahead of schedule and lost the government
from a comfortable 26-15 majority, former Prime Minister Patrick Manning should
not merely accept full responsibility for the loss of office by the PNM
Government in Monday’s general election, but he should act in the highest
interest of our Westminster tradition and resign now as leader of the PNM. By so
doing he will eliminate himself from being considered by the President as Leader
of the Opposition and so allow his party to go about the process of selecting
someone who will command the majority of those who do not support the
Government.
In resigning, Mr Manning will be following in the noble tradition of Westminster
and in the light of the recent examples set down by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair
in Britain and Owen Arthur of Barbados foremost in the mind. For Mr Manning to
leave it up to the general council of the PNM to make the decision on his
future, more so a body packed with people who owe their appointment to him,
would be unacceptable. To give a sense of the enormity of the defeat, which
gives rise and justification for Mr Manning to resign from the political
leadership of his party, the PNM lost eight of the 13 seats it held along the
east/west corridor after the 2007 general election.
Major amongst those defeats are Arima, O’Meara/D’Abadie, Lopinot/Bon Air West,
La Horquetta/Talparo, all heartland PNM constituencies. Indeed, it was the case
in many of those instances that they are seats which were created by PNM
governments from the perspective that they built housing settlements there into
which traditional PNM supporters were lodged. In the north/west, the PNM was
seriously challenged in the Diego Martin constituencies and it barely survived
without losing one of them.
Across in Tobago—where the PNM has been in control, not only at the
parliamentary level but at the level of the Tobago House of Assembly, having won
the THA elections last year—the party suffered a complete wipeout on Monday. The
PNM fared even worse in the so-called marginal seats. The party lost all of the
swing seats across the nation it had won in 2007. What compounds the situation
is first the fact that Mr Manning acknowledged that he and he alone took the
decision to go to the polls early. Secondly, during the campaign, especially
towards the end, he often boasted about this being the greatest political
mobilisation in the history of the country.
It turns out to have been one of the greatest political blunders in the history
of the Caribbean. So the case is clearly made, Mr Manning should leave without
having to be pushed. But while we make this call for Mr Manning to resign from
the leadership of the PNM, we nevertheless acknowledge and record the sterling
contribution made by him in nearly 40 years in office. As is well known, he was
brought into the politics as a youngster with little experience. Over the
decades he was given responsibility in several significant ministries including
the vital Ministry of Energy.
In 1986 after the PNM was first devastated in an election, he, the most likely
to have been given leadership, took up the mantle left to him. In five short
years, Mr Manning along with others rebuilt the PNM, making it into a force that
was strong enough to sweep back into the government in 1991. His legacy was made
in his four-year stint as Prime Minister in the early 1990s and perhaps two of
his greatest contributions were the opening up of the economy to market forces
in the early 1990s and his development of the natural gas industry, leading to
the inauguration of the first LNG train in 1999. To preserve his legacy, the
time is right for him to bow out of the political limelight gracefully. This
would give him the opportunity to play the role of senior adviser, similar to
that of Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew, in the political leadership of the PNM.