Sto­ry by RENU­KA SINGH

Af­ter 40 years in pol­i­tics, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley ad­mit­ted pub­licly that he con­sid­ered not run­ning in the re­cent­ly con­clud­ed 2020 Gen­er­al Elec­tions.

Speak­ing on CNC3's The Morn­ing Brew pro­gramme on Wednes­day, Row­ley said he did not let any­one with­in his cam­paign know be­cause he felt they would not have un­der­stood the mean­ing be­hind it.

“Do you know what 40 years is? I’ve been in this for a long time, and there are things I want to do that are loom­ing. I’m be­gin­ning to look over the hori­zon," he said.

"There comes a time when you start to look over the hori­zon, and I guess I'm at that age," he said.

Row­ley al­so did not want to talk about whether he would be run­ning in the next gen­er­al elec­tions in the next five years.

"I don't think that I should, at this stage, be tak­ing that de­ci­sion, but I have tak­en the de­ci­sion that I should be tran­si­tion­ing," he said.

He has al­so tak­en no de­ci­sion on whether he would con­test for the up­com­ing in­ter­nal lead­er­ship elec­tions.

"The PNM is well or­gan­ised to deal with these sit­u­a­tions," he said.

He al­so did not want to get in­to the is­sue of suc­ces­sion plan­ning be­cause the PNM is not a "monar­chy".

"This is not a monar­chy where your pick your suc­ces­sor. My role is to make sure that the peo­ple who I have brought in­to the par­ty and those who are here now are trained in such a way that when we have to pick some­one to lead the par­ty, there are peo­ple to fill the role well," he said.

He said while he has no one ear­marked to re­place him, he is work­ing with the peo­ple and pro­duc­ing peo­ple with­in the PNM.

"My role is to make sure that those peo­ple are de­vel­oped to a point that when it is time for the se­lec­tion of some­one to re­place me that the par­ty and the coun­try has peo­ple who can say 'I fit the bill;," he said.

He said he was most proud to be the dri­ver be­hind the "one man one vote" and away from the del­e­gate sys­tem.