Zahra Gor­don

There seemed to be no clear win­ner at the end of last night's his­toric To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) de­bate at the Mag­dale­na Grand Ho­tel.

Host­ed by the T&T De­bates Com­mis­sion, the de­bate fea­tured po­lit­i­cal lead­ers Ash­worth Jack (To­ba­go Or­gan­i­sa­tion of the Peo­ple), Ho­choy Charles (Plat­form of Truth) and in­cum­bent THA Chief Sec­re­tary Orville Lon­don, and was tele­vised live on ma­jor lo­cal tele­vi­sion and ra­dio from 8.

At the end of the de­bate at 9.35 pm, how­ev­er, To­bag­o­ni­ans and the gen­er­al pub­lic may have been on­ly a lit­tle bet­ter off in terms of their knowl­edge of the par­ties' philoso­phies on key is­sues ahead of the Jan­u­ary 21 elec­tion.

This is be­cause the de­bate's fa­cil­i­ta­tor, Ronald Ramkissoon, ran a tight ship due to the time con­straints, and did not al­low the po­lit­i­cal lead­ers too much time to ex­pand on ques­tions posed by ques­tion­ers, for­mer head of the T&T Trans­paren­cy In­sti­tute, Vic­tor Hart, and Hay­den Blades, an econ­o­mist who is pres­i­dent of Busi­ness In­sight Ltd. In fact, Ramkissoon of­ten abrupt­ly end­ed the con­tri­bu­tions of the lead­ers as they went over their stip­u­lat­ed speak­ing time.

While Lon­don ap­peared the most poised and ar­tic­u­late of de­baters last evening, his an­swers weighed heav­i­ly on lists of ini­tia­tives and pro­grammes which he cred­it­ed to his Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment.

When asked how he would ad­dress youth un­em­ploy­ment, Lon­don list­ed var­i­ous pro­grammes al­ready in place or no longer in place, rather than stat­ing what new ini­tia­tives would be car­ried out.

On the oth­er hand, Jack's re­spons­es seemed to lay con­stant blame on the PNM-led THA. When asked the same ques­tion about youth un­em­ploy­ment, Jack claimed youth un­em­ploy­ment was an in­dict­ment on Lon­don's ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Fur­ther re­spons­es to ques­tions about the shar­ing of oil and gas rev­enues, the Scar­bor­ough hos­pi­tal and eco­nom­ic in­fla­tion were al­so linked to the Jack's ac­cu­sa­tions of poor gov­er­nance on the part of the PNM-led THA.

Yet both Lon­don and Jack were able to give more con­crete re­spons­es than Charles, who prof­fered what sound­ed like a some­what To­ba­go-na­tion­al­ist sound­ing agen­da. His open­ing re­marks stat­ed that Trinidad-based po­lit­i­cal par­ties were ir­rel­e­vant to To­ba­go is­sues and set the tone for his con­tri­bu­tion.

How­ev­er, as a can­di­date run­ning for of­fice, there were one too many oc­ca­sions when Charles' re­spons­es were pre­ced­ed by ad­mis­sion of ig­no­rance to in­for­ma­tion. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, he seemed to boil all mat­ters down to To­bag­o­ni­ans need­ing "em­pow­er­ment."