Politically Incorrect II
The serious unease in the Tobago NAR about their political leader Hochoy Charles that lurked out of the gaze of the media broke into the news this week, with six members of the executive agreeing to a motion of no-confidence in his leadership. Spokesman for the group, Deputy Chairman Cristo Gift, said that it was more than time that Charles let go of the leadership, especially as he had led the party to defeat in four consecutive elections. But, in an immediate response, Charles retorted that Gift was an agent of destruction and that the motion would fail at the wider level of the party which was fully behind him. He also likened Gift's challenge to his leadership to challenges to Patrick Manning's and Basdeo Panday's leadership in the PNM and UNC respectively.
Hochoy Charles, erstwhile Chief Secretary of the Tobago House of Assembly (THA), is being, and has been for some time now, politically incorrect. On at least three grounds.
The first is his steadfast refusal to resign after leading the NAR to defeat in election after election. The first defeat came on the heels of the ADDA scandal and his boast that he would repeat the behaviour that led to the scandal if he had the chance again; he lost the THA elections that time and, with it, the chief secretaryship. The second defeat came in the 2000 parliamentary elections immediately following when the party lost the Tobago West seat but retained Tobago East. The third came in the 2001 parliamentary elections when the party lost both seats in the 18-18 deadlock, with Charles himself as the losing candidate for Tobago West. The fourth came in this year's deadlock breaker in which the party retained its losses.
In democratically enlightened polities, which are not available in the Caribbean, the political leader would have resigned long before the fourth defeat, most probably after the second. But our political culture obviously reassured Charles that he should stand his ground. After all, the people had wrong-headedly bought the PNM's hype about his reckless spending and lack of accountability. They would soon realize the error of their ways, and he had to be in the leadership to tell them, 'I told you so!'. No number of election defeats would suffice!
The second ground is inability to interpret the voice of both party and people. The successive losses, in elections that were free and fair, were telling him in language unambiguous to all but the Incumbent Leader and his diehard supporters that serious deficits had occurred in the long-held support base of the party, and that they were due to, among other things, his ADDA excesses, his unrepentant arrogance, a certain contrastive peaceableness in Orville London's leadership style, and the swinging-back to the PNM (in the Afro-dominated constituencies, at least) as a backlash to the UNC's brazen and vulgar corruption. But he could not read the play, hoist as he was on his own petard of being Tobago's most knowledgeable, longest-serving, and shrewdest politician - the one who had inherited the mantle of the island's most accomplished politician-turned-President. He had come to be locked in a self-righteousness that that blinded him to realities on the ground and that took away the little humility that he must have had. After all, like Williams, Robinson, and Panday (and Manning for a crazy moment), there was no one to replace him.
The third ground is his unprovoked haste to associate his leadership with that of Manning and Panday. The facile association is most definitely justified on the criteria of maximumness of leadership and election defeat, but by no stretch of the reasonable imagination could it be justified on anything else. Gift's challenge was a vote of no-confidence by fully six members of Charles' executive; Rowley's challenge was effected through merely offering himself as an alternative candidate to Manning for the leadership of the PNM after Manning threw away the government through an egregious miscalculation; and Ramesh Maharaj's is hardly a challenge since it is coming from outside of the party and, improbably, from persons in the hierarchy who have not established themselves as movers and shakers in the party. There was no no-confidence vote against Manning, and there is none against Panday. And none had lost four successive elections. The only thing that makes Charles' association work is non-acceptance of a challenge by whomever. Which shows his maximum leadership hand.
It appears that there will be a general meeting on December 8 when there might be a chance of the rank and file voting on the motion. I am wondering whether Charles will not continue to misread the mood of the party if they vote him out of the leadership. But will the motion, or something like it, make it onto the agenda?
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