The Manning administration is going to Parliament Monday to once again postpone the local election for 12 months. It's a move that was widely expected, despite Patrick Manning's recent battle cry to his supporters to arm themselves with their "political cutlasses".While it is clear that in the present chaotic state of opposition politics winning the vote would have been easy for the People's National Movement (PNM) Manning doesn't need the distraction at the moment. There are two principal reasons for it.
He is hosting his second international summit this year, the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in November. And he isn't finished with tinkering with local government.
Manning's wife, Local Government Minister Senator Hazel Manning, went to Parliament last Friday with a long-awaited reform proposal for local government that had been holding up the vote.
While she calls it "revolutionary" some of it's provisions are making many people uneasy, especially since the Manning plan would wrest control of local government from elected representatives.
The current system, imperfect as it is, allows the party that wins a majority in a municipality or city to appoint a mayor or chairman and establish priorities in keeping with its mandate from voters. The administration is done by independent and apolitical civil servants who take directions from the corporation.
This means that while one party controls the central government at least some municipalities and/or cities could be governed by a party that does not necessarily share the government's philosophy.
The proposed change will deal with that problem by giving the minister of local government the authority to hire the chief executives and most senior personnel of the corporation. And they would be on contract.
That raises two issues: what happens to the civil servants who are now permanently employed in the local government system and the transparency and Independence of the new system.
If a cabinet minister can hand out contracts then the unwritten expectation is that the contractor is going to have to do the minister's bidding or have the contract rescinded. That would make the political administration of the local government bodies almost impotent.
So what the government is moving to do is push the reforms through a parliamentary committee away from the media glare and as it does so it would be business as usual with the corporations for another year.
The other end of this political equation is that it gives Basdeo Panday another year as head of his United National Congress (UNC) because the party's national executive has refused to budge from its position that it won't hold internal elections until after the local government vote.
But can Panday last that long, given the current mobilization by the so-called RAMJACK group, that is launching a frontal attack on Panday with a nationwide blitz this week to sell its Platform for Change that demands UNC internal elections NOW?
Panday is known for his political savvy and his miraculous comebacks from "near-death" political situations and he is no doubt counting on doing it again. But this time he is fighting a determined adversary in Jack Warner who is using a Panday tactic to try to defeat his leader - people power.
Warner is consistent on his mantra that he is doing all this for the people with the support of the people and that he is reforming and modernizing the party to position it to get back to Whitehall.
His platform for change even praises Panday but at the same time clearly states that it's time to move on. And so far he says he has had at least 40 thousand positive and encouraging responses since the launch of the platform on June 8.
Now armed with a portable caravan the Platform for Change is blitzing the country for eight days, starting Wednesday, before heading to a mass meeting to seek the guidance of the people.
The strategy is to create enough hype and generate enough interest to demonstrate that the people are ready for change and that the old guard at Rienzi must listen to the people or be declared redundant.
There's no turning back from this epic battle.
The question now is which of the two visions of the UNC the people will embrace. In a democracy, the people are more powerful than their leaders and they will have to determine their destiny in how their act.
In the final analysis, the old adage holds true: the people get what they deserve!
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