To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

?Sun­day night's vic­to­ry by Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, plac­ing her as the new po­lit­i­cal leader of the op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC), is tan­ta­mount to a po­lit­i­cal earth­quake in T&T. And while the po­lit­i­cal shake-up may not leave any­one dead, there are like­ly to be many ca­reers that end up be­ing bad­ly wound­ed. Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar has done what many men be­fore her have failed to do: she top­pled the man whose name has be­come syn­ony­mous with post-in­de­pen­dence op­po­si­tion pol­i­tics in T&T–Bas­deo Pan­day. Al­though the elec­tion ma­chin­ery was clear­ly stacked against her and her slate with a large num­ber of vot­ers be­ing dis­en­fran­chised, the huge mar­gin of Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar's vic­to­ry for the post of po­lit­i­cal leader of the UNC was a clear in­di­ca­tion that al­most every mem­ber of the par­ty want­ed change.

Giv­en the very clear mes­sage of the UNC mem­bers in terms of their de­mo­c­ra­t­ic choice of lead­ers, Mr Pan­day would serve the in­ter­ests of his par­ty and the coun­try's democ­ra­cy if he were to re­lin­quish the role of Op­po­si­tion Leader. While this may not be easy, Mr Pan­day needs to put aside his hurt, his wound­ed pride and his bruised ego and di­rect those MPs who may still hold some loy­al­ty to him to sup­port Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar. In do­ing so, he would set a new and much high­er bar for states­man­ship in the Caribbean, he would go some way to re­mov­ing the stain of his own state­ment that pol­i­tics has a moral­i­ty of its own, and he would leave a lega­cy of putting his par­ty be­fore him­self. But giv­en his re­cent his­to­ry with Win­ston Dook­er­an over a sim­i­lar con­test, it would sur­prise no one if Mr Pan­day fights to the fin­ish to main­tain his hold over the post of Leader of the Op­po­si­tion, which gives him a well-de­fined, con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly man­dat­ed role and the abil­i­ty to ap­point sen­a­tors who are loy­al to him.

If he in­sists on putting up a fight to main­tain the of­fice, Mr Pan­day would have suf­fered the ig­no­ble trans­for­ma­tion from be­ing a 42-year-old at­tor­ney who fought to im­prove the lot of sug­ar work­ers in the mid-1970s to a 77-year-old for­mer po­lit­i­cal leader fight­ing to re­tain of­fice and fight­ing, as well, to stay out of jail. This is prob­a­bly not how Mr Pan­day would like to be re­mem­bered. Mr Pan­day has al­ways said he re­spects the de­mo­c­ra­t­ic will of the peo­ple ex­pressed in free and fair elec­tions. He has demon­strat­ed this by his de­ci­sion not to con­test the in­con­ceiv­able and wrong de­ci­sion of then Pres­i­dent Arthur NR Robin­son to take the pre­mier­ship away from him and give it to Patrick Man­ning in 2001 when the re­sult was an 18-18 tie.

That de­ci­sion saved T&T from a stale­mate sit­u­a­tion and a po­ten­tial po­lit­i­cal melt­down. It so­lid­i­fied Mr Pan­day's rep­u­ta­tion as a true de­mo­c­rat–some­one who put his coun­try be­fore him­self and who re­spect­ed the fact that the um­pire's de­ci­sion is al­ways fi­nal and ought not to be ques­tioned. If Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar can as­sume the post of Leader of the Op­po­si­tion to go with her elect­ed role as the po­lit­i­cal leader of the UNC, she would have the lever­age to bring the coun­try's op­po­si­tion par­ties to­geth­er. This is not some­thing that we ad­vo­cate but there are clear­ly some peo­ple who would ar­gue that a uni­fied, en­gaged op­po­si­tion can on­ly be in the best in­ter­est of T&T's democ­ra­cy. The Op­po­si­tion MPs who now sup­port Mr Pan­day should al­so re­alise where lies the best in­ter­ests of the UNC. We con­grat­u­late all the win­ners of the UNC's in­ter­nal par­ty elec­tions and hope they re­mem­ber that they have been elect­ed to serve the peo­ple and not them­selves.