?A fresh ef­fort with a de­mo­c­ra­t­ic twist is be­ing made to throw up an Op­po­si­tion Leader who can unite all forces against the rul­ing PNM. Spear­head­ing the ef­fort to hold what is, to all in­tents and pur­pos­es, a na­tion­al ref­er­en­dum, is Move­ment for Na­tion­al De­vel­op­ment (MND) po­lit­i­cal leader, Garvin Nicholas.

Root­ed in the tru­ism that "the voice of the peo­ple is the voice of God," Nicholas has come up with the idea to hold a ref­er­en­dum with a dif­fer­ence, in­volv­ing all 1,022,284 mem­bers of the elec­torate in T&T. He is be­ing sup­port­ed by YesTT leader, Stephen Cadiz, and he plans to fund the process through pledges from cit­i­zens and the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty, in par­tic­u­lar the Cham­bers of Com­merce and the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers' As­so­ci­a­tion.

This, he said, would al­low for wider par­tic­i­pa­tion.

Nicholas told the Sun­day Guardian in an in­ter­view at his Aber­crom­by Street, Port-of-Spain, law of­fice, last week, that hold­ing the ref­er­en­dum would cost $3.5 mil­lion. Nicholas said he had en­gaged se­nior UNC-A and COP of­fi­cials in talks on his ref­er­en­dum pro­pos­als, and had re­ceived "very good feed­back." He added: "There were con­cerns, how­ev­er, that the PNM would seek to hi­jack the ref­er­en­dum."

Nicholas has ab­so­lutue con­fi­dence, how­ev­er, that the peoople of T&T are ma­ture enough to en­gage in the project for a suc­cess­ful out­come. "My think­ing is let every­one el­i­gi­ble to vote have their say. And let the chips fall where they may," said Nicholas. He said the T&T Con­sti­tu­tion did not recog­nise the hold­ing of a ref­er­en­dum to make po­lit­i­cal de­ci­sions, but it was hoped if the cur­rent ef­fort came off suc­cess­ful­ly, it would in­flu­ence con­sti­tu­tion re­form in this di­rec­tion.

All ex­ist­ing po­lit­i­cal par­ties out­side of the PNM, in­clud­ing splin­ter groups, would be asked to pro­pose the name of an Op­po­si­tion Leader to be placed on a bal­lot pa­per, which would be post­ed to the T&T elec­torate, as de­tailed on the Elec­tions and Bound­aries Com­mis­sion's (EBC) lat­est vot­ing list, which is be­ing post­ed in all 41 con­stituen­cies this month. Re­spon­dents would be asked to tick the re­spec­tive leader they sup­port­ed and ei­ther mail or hand-de­liv­er the bal­lot pa­per back to the re­turn­ing of­fi­cers the MND would have put in place.

Nicholas said among the par­ties to be in­vit­ed to high­light lead­ers would be "Pan­day's UNC, Ram­jack UNC, Dook­er­an's COP, Meighoo's DNA, Al­varez's DPTT, Charles' NAR and my MND." Nicholas said they in­tend­ed to hire au­di­tors ap­proved by the var­i­ous par­ties to en­sure the in­tegri­ty of the process.