Richard Lord

Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley says he is not sur­prised by yes­ter­day's "com­pre­hen­sive" 11 to 3 de­feat by the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship in the lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tions. Row­ley, who led the PNM for the first time in an elec­tion, con­ced­ed de­feat at a sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed Bal­isi­er House, short­ly af­ter nine last night. "Tonight, the news is not as good as we would like it to be... As of now, we would have lost the lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tions quite com­pre­hen­sive­ly," he said. Row­ley said the re­sult was "not very sur­pris­ing to us, giv­en the fact that we view it as a bit of a con­tin­u­a­tion of an elec­tion that took place eight weeks ago.

"The lo­cal elec­tions seemed to have gone very much the same way," he added. The an­tic­i­pat­ed PNM sup­port­ers stayed away from Bal­isi­er House last night. There were no ven­dors out­side, there was no pub­lic ad­dress sys­tem or stage.

Af­ter the con­ces­sion, for­mer Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mustapha Ab­dul-Hamid ar­rived and em­braced Row­ley. Chief whip Mar­lene Mc­Don­ald al­so ar­rived at Bal­isi­er House to lend her sup­port to Row­ley. The PNM re­tained Port-of-Spain, Point Fortin and San Juan/Laven­tille cor­po­ra­tions, while the PP re­tain its five cor­po­ra­tions and took six pre­vi­ous­ly held by the PNM, in­clud­ing San Fer­nan­do. Row­ley said the in­ad­e­quate time the par­ty had to pre­pare may have ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed the PNM at the polls yes­ter­day. He said the Gov­ern­ment's eight-week record was not suf­fi­cient for the PNM to con­vince the elec­torate of the need to re­ject it in the lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tions. He said the PNM was not de­spon­dent with the out­come of the elec­tions. "We are quite pleased to have won three cor­po­ra­tions...we would have been hap­pi­er if we had won more," he added. Asked about the fu­ture of the PNM, af­ter two ma­jor loss­es in just over two months, Row­ley said the par­ty had to un­der­go a com­pre­hen­sive re­view. "We have to re­or­gan­ise our par­ty, we have to stay the course and we have to op­er­ate in a way that we can grow," he said. "The PNM has been suf­fer­ing some con­trac­tion in re­cent time, so we have to try and re­verse that."

Asked about the de­feat in the Diego Mar­tin re­gion, Row­ley said the writ­ing was on the wall since the May 24 gen­er­al elec­tion, when the PNM MPs in that re­gion "strug­gled to hold those seats. "Giv­en that we were (de­feat­ed) 29/12 eight weeks ago, it would have been quite un­usu­al for us to have turned that around on a gov­ern­ment that re­al­ly hasn't done any­thing as yet," Row­ley stressed. He said it was un­rea­son­able for any­one to have ex­pect­ed a ma­jor turn­around for the 54-year-old par­ty in the past three-week pe­ri­od that he had been at the helm. "I am good, but I am not that good," he said. Mean­while, out­go­ing May­or of Port-of-Spain Murchi­son Brown said he was not sur­prised by the re­sults. He said the seats won by the PNM were the ones that were nor­mal­ly won by that par­ty. The PP won Wood­brook and St James East in the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion. He said he was will­ing to con­tin­ue as may­or, if re­quest­ed by the PNM.