Richard Lord

For­mer Op­po­si­tion Leader Bas­deo Pan­day says a new po­lit­i­cal par­ty may be formed in T&T. Pan­day made the state­ment dur­ing a brief in­ter­view yes­ter­day. Asked to com­ment on the state of af­fairs with­in the Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) and moves to achieve op­po­si­tion uni­ty, Pan­day said: "If they (par­ty lead­ers) con­tin­ue to be spite­ful and ag­o­nise enough peo­ple, maybe they (the ag­o­nised) would form a new po­lit­i­cal par­ty, which would de­feat the en­tire process of uni­ty."

Asked if he was ex­pect­ed to play any role in that ex­er­cise, Pan­day quick­ly re­spond­ed: "No, no, no. I now have the time to do a lot of the things I al­ways want­ed to do and I am en­joy­ing my life." Pan­day said he was study­ing lit­er­a­ture, lis­ten­ing to mu­sic and read­ing books. He said he has re­sumed work on his au­to­bi­og­ra­phy. He said any at­tempt to achieve op­po­si­tion uni­ty would be un­suc­cess­ful if the lead­ers could not gen­uine­ly come to­geth­er. He said there must be mean­ing­ful dis­cus­sions among the lead­ers if the op­po­si­tion has to en­gage the rul­ing Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) in a one-on-one elec­tion bat­tle.

And Pan­day has wel­comed the move by the Gov­ern­ment to lay the con­tro­ver­sial, un­sani­tised re­port of the Uff Com­mis­sion of En­quiry in­to the Con­struc­tion Sec­tor and the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T (Ude­cott) in the Sen­ate. "It was the right thing to do," Pan­day added. He said, how­ev­er, that there was the re­al dan­ger of li­belling in­no­cent peo­ple by tabling the doc­u­ment in the Par­lia­ment. But he quick­ly coun­tered say­ing that most of the peo­ple in­ter­viewed and named in the re­port would have been cross-ex­am­ined in the com­mis­sion hear­ings be­fore chair­man Prof John Uff. (RL)