Latinnews Archive
Caribbean & Central America - 30 October 1981
TRINIDAD & TOBAGO: Staying with the PNM?
As campaigning began in earnest this month the ruling People's National Movement (PNM) stood an excellent chance of being re-elected for a sixth straight term in general elections on 9 November, even though it has already been in power for 25 years and in March lost its founder and guru, Dr Eric Williams. The most recent opinion poll, published in the conservative Sunday Guardian on 11 October, gave the PNM a 20 per cent lead over its nearest rival, the right-wing Organisation for National Reconstruction with 31 per cent to the ONR's 11.
Prime minister George Chambers has evidently put faith in the strategy that always worked for Williams -- months of cryptic silence, followed by a sudden, swift, aggressive campaign marked by careful organisation and tight discipline. 'Believe me,' he told a big rally in Port of Spain's Woodford Square on 11 October as he announced the election date, 'I have not served in Eric Williams's PNM for 25 years for nothing.'
Chambers promised some tax reliefs for next year, declared his assets, pledged decentralisation of government, and explained that his primary aim since March had been to ensure a smooth transition of power. He announced forfeiture of the contract to build the controversial Malabar housing scheme, and no further payments to Sam P. Wallace, the American contractor responsible for the major work at the US$100m Caroni racing complex, who had refused to reveal whether Trinidad & Tobago was involved in pay-off allegations surfacing in the US.
The ONR has so far eclipsed the traditional moderate-left, East Indianbased opposition parties of previous elections, and is clearly perceived by the PNM as the main threat. Chambers has been systematically attacking ONR leader Karl Hudson-Phillips as a potential dictator, particularly for the draconian Public Order Act he produced ten years ago as attorney-general in Williams's cabinet -- though Chambers himself was in the cabinet at the time. The draft Act, which was later withdrawn, was 'the product of a certain type of mind', Chambers claims, and the ONR leadership was a 'gang of four' which would turn the country into a concentration camp. 'They are too wicked! Not a damn seat for them!' runs the PNM slogan.
The ONR asked for police protection for its meetings in early October, and Hudson-Phillips has threatened that PNM ministers will be made to 'answer' to the people, 'who will be the jury.' The ONR, supported mainly by PNM defectors, is exploiting the PNM's weak points -- the allegations of corruption, slack management, and the need for change -- but little separates the parties ideologically except the ONR's opposition to the massive state capitalism developed by the PNM during the 1970s. Denying charges of American backing, the ONR claims that only TT$10,000 of its funds have been raised abroad, the rest coming from its membership, which it claims is 30,000.
The opposition has learned little from 25 years of defeats and the failure to evolve a viable, lasting challenge to the PNM. The ONR is determined to dislodge the PNM on its own from the right, though it is less than a year old. The official opposition United Labour Front (ULF), which split a year after it won 10 seats in the 1976 election, against the PNM's 24, has joined forces with the Democratic Action Congress (DAC), which won the two Tobago seats, and the Tapia House Movement, which lost ail its deposits, in an electoral pact, which will reduce the traditional splitting of the opposition vote, but has failed to bring in the left-wing National Joint Action Committee or the right-wing ONR.
The three parties have shared out the 36 constituencies between their candidates, and A.N.R. Robinson, the DAC leader and chairman of the Tobago House of Assembly, says they can win 15 at least and possibly 19, though that is probably very optimistic. However, the electorate is bigger by 125,000 than in 1976, and though it is deeply conservative, strongly influenced by ethnic loyalties, traditional voting habits have been weakened by affluence and the emergence of a right-wing opposition, and there is a chance that the PNM may not win an overall majority. October's poll predicted an abstention rate of 26 per cent, with 27 per cent undecided, substantially less than the 46 per cent identified by the previous poll published by the Trinidad Express in July. In September 1976 the PNM won 54 per cent of the vote and the ULF 27 per cent, but 250,000 voters abstained.
By mid-October, the government had still not been able to settle 1981-83 wage levels with its 52,000 monthly-paid public servants, including teachers. It had offered 43 per cent to counter the workers' demand of 115 per cent, and the public service unions have hinted at industrial action which could disrupt the election machinery.
The systematic vilification of Grenada in the Trinidad press produced a spark of protest when journalists from all media objected to a front-page editorial headlined 'Free Grenada, Mr Bishop', which was supplied by the Caribbean Publishers' and Broadcasters' Association and was carried by both Sunday papers in Trinidad and elsewhere in the Caribbean on 27 September. The journalists denounced the move as 'an unusual and unhealthy precedent in projecting a collective editorial position ' which would 'give credence to charges of collusion and conspiracy among the media.' A three-member team was chosen to investigate reports of 'the abuse of press freedom in Grenada' and 'physical abuse of independent journalist Alister Hughes'. By mid-October the team had not left, and one member, Trever Smith of the weekly Challenge, had dropped out on the grounds that the trip would be "inviting death'.
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