As last Mon­day’s UNC town hall meet­ing wound down, a known UNC diehard told Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar, “Dey beg­gin’ meh out­side dere to bring Mick­ela Pan­day to you …” The UNC po­lit­i­cal leader re­spond­ed, “Ask her who is fund­ing her par­ty.”

Mick­ela Pan­day, leader of the Pa­tri­ot­ic Front, got the mes­sage and in an of­fi­cial state­ment called on the UNC, “as the of­fi­cial Op­po­si­tion, to stand in sol­i­dar­i­ty with us in de­mand­ing ur­gent cam­paign fi­nance re­form be­fore the 2025 gen­er­al elec­tion.” Put sim­ply: Let’s Unite!

Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar warns of the PNM’s “friends, fam­i­ly, and fi­nanciers,” so this is her op­por­tu­ni­ty to reach her hand across to Mick­ela, the daugh­ter of her beloved gu­ru, on a crit­i­cal na­tion­al is­sue. Will Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar re­ject this en­thralling team-up?

The long-lost daugh­ter’s re­turn to the par­ty found­ed by the Sil­ver Fox him­self will be an ab­solute block­buster in GE 2025! PM Row­ley’s se­lec­tion of Bri­an Man­ning to fight for the PNM in his fa­ther’s for­mer con­stituen­cy was the fairy tale that re­turned the Man­ning fac­tion to se­cure the PNM gov­ern­ment’s re­peat win in 2020.

Will Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar make such a sure­fire win­ning move, not on­ly for the UNC and its sup­port­ers but for the en­tire na­tion? As re­gards cam­paign fi­nanc­ing, as a busi­ness­woman my­self, I won­der at the lev­el of in­flu­ence “spe­cial in­ter­ests” ex­ert on politi­cians be­hind the scenes. Every par­ty has a prob­lem with their op­po­nents’ source of fund­ing while be­ing quite pro­tec­tive of their own.

Cer­tain­ly, many (if not all) po­lit­i­cal in­vestors would pre­fer pub­lic anonymi­ty, so manda­to­ry dis­clo­sure may be to the detri­ment of the op­er­a­tions and de­vel­op­ment of the var­i­ous par­ties. It may shock the cit­i­zen­ry to know that com­pet­ing par­ties have the same fi­nanciers from time to time. It’s just good busi­ness sense to “hedge their bets,” af­ter all. It is be­lieved that when a po­lit­i­cal par­ty wins gov­ern­ment, their fi­nanciers ben­e­fit. That’s good busi­ness. How­ev­er, par­tic­u­lar par­ties have been em­ploy­ing “gov­ern­ment-los­ing” or rather “op­po­si­tion-se­cur­ing” strate­gies for some time now.

Do their fi­nanciers fa­cil­i­tate “mar­ket stud­ies,” ie, polls of the ac­tu­al na­tion­al elec­torate, and urge the par­ty to make de­ci­sions that will make good busi­ness sense, ie, win­ning elec­tions?

As I pre­dict­ed, No­vem­ber 27 came and went with no elec­tion an­nounce­ment by PM Row­ley, so “GE 2024” is a con­firmed im­pos­si­bil­i­ty. Still, he shocked us with his Cab­i­net’s ac­cep­tance of the 120th SRC re­port, though, and by say­ing that he was pre­pared to face the “po­lit­i­cal” con­se­quences in this elec­tion year. The feed­back I gath­ered from sev­er­al pro­fes­sion­als was the same as what I heard from the dou­bles man: “Dem politi­cians on­ly care about dey­self!”

The CPO should have a rough ride from here on out as all unions will turn the screws. It could al­so be said that the “UNC coali­tion wants some licks” if they don’t win next year’s gen­er­al elec­tion. It doesn’t mat­ter that PM Row­ley re­vealed that the Op­po­si­tion was pri­vate­ly “rins­ing out (my) ears that they want it.”

He closed his post-Cab­i­net press­er by an­nounc­ing that MP Hinds will not be stand­ing for re-elec­tion in GE 2025. So it dawned on me that PM Row­ley is adopt­ing the SRC re­port as a gold­en hand­shake to clean house ahead of GE 2025.

Hinds’ “sweet sor­row” fore­shad­ows the re­place­ment of the PNM’s less pop­u­lar MPs. Iron­i­cal­ly, PM Row­ley has dropped the same ‘part­ing gift’ op­por­tu­ni­ty in­to the lap of the UNC po­lit­i­cal leader! Will she bench her un­pop­u­lar, “easy tar­get” MPs and re­turn the UNC coali­tion to gov­ern­ment?

I have heard too much from too many sources about the fail­ings of too many sit­ting Op­po­si­tion MPs and sen­a­tors typ­i­fied by their in­abil­i­ty to mo­bilise at least one or­gan­ic na­tion­al protest in the last term and not bring a sin­gle mo­tion of no con­fi­dence in PM Row­ley and his PNM Gov­ern­ment.

I was sur­prised last week to see the UNC Na­tex’s last To­ba­go Re­gion­al Rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Tahar­qa Obi­ka, take the oath as a PNM Sen­a­tor while the UNC lead­er­ship has been un­able to find a place for the re­turned “prodi­gal son” Vas­ant Bharath on its sen­a­to­r­i­al bench.

Per­haps the UNC’s long-await­ed GE 2025 screen­ing, which be­gan last Fri­day, will re­sult in the an­nounce­ment of can­di­dates who will be good for gov­ern­ment as well as for busi­ness.

I was in­formed that the screen­ing be­gan with mar­gin­al seats in Barataria/San Juan, Ch­agua­nas East, St Joseph, and La Hor­quet­ta/Tal­paro. It is a good move to treat swing-prone seats first. Af­ter NTA po­lit­i­cal leader Gary Grif­fith was se­lect­ed to run for St Joseph, Dr Kevin Sar­ran is the sec­ond con­firmed NTA can­di­date. He has been se­lect­ed for the mar­gin­al seat of San Fer­nan­do West. His op­po­nents could be in­cum­bent PNM MP Min­is­ter Faris Al-Rawi and Dr Michael Dowlat for the UNC.

Al-Rawi won that seat by a mere 1,800 votes in 2020, but the cur­rent dis­en­chant­ment with both the Gov­ern­ment and Op­po­si­tion could see a par­a­digm shift next year, es­pe­cial­ly in the mar­gin­als.

As a busi­ness­woman, I will share good busi­ness sense with the UNC lead­er­ship: in­vite the PF, NTA, HOPE, MSJ and TPP to round-ta­ble dis­cus­sions or sep­a­rate­ly. That’s how gov­ern­ment will be won. It hap­pened be­fore and will hap­pen again. That’s not on­ly good busi­ness sense. It’s just com­mon sense.