Guest Editorial: Has the UNC lost its way?

When a movement stops moving, by definition, it dies.

The UNC elite believe they are still a party in motion, but they are moving side to side at the highest levels of the party while people below them are being ignored.

I was born a Trinidadian. My country and its people remain in my heart and mind every minute of every day.

Circumstances led to my family being transplanted to Canada, but it was clear to my three brothers and me growing up with our parents in near cultural isolation from our homeland that Trinidadian politics was the issue of the day, whether we liked it or not. (I liked it.) It was how we connected with home.

Even though I am not a resident of Trinidad and Tobago, I feel personally betrayed by the political machinery of its bureaucratic, anti-democratic nature across party lines.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Basdeo Panday, and his leadership established over decades of struggling with the people to fight for a better country.

When I first met him, I was an idealistic 18-year old, volunteering with the UNC for the summer before starting my undergraduate degree.

My experience with the UNC influenced my decision to study Political Science. I met with Panday at Rienzi in 2002 and was very inspired by this leader who carried such charm, charisma, and experience with ease.

He listened carefully, he thought thoroughly, and he planned strategically.

We talked about lots of things, but one conversation in particular stands out in my memory. He told me that I was young and radical today, but as I aged, I would become a little less radical. As I got a little older still and took on more adult responsibilities, I would become a little conservative. I would have to worry about things like bills, or looking after children, and eventually, by the time I was middle aged or so, I would find it hard to remember being a young 18 year old radical who wanted revolutionary change.

I’ve never forgotten that conversation, and it occurs to me almost 8 years later, just two days before the UNC will hold an allegedly free vote on leadership, that what Mr. Panday was saying is autobiographical.

He was a young radical, he fought hard and long to build an opposition movement that could challenge the ‘divine right’ of the PNM. And he succeeded, for a while.

But as his movement, his party, got older, it started taking on more bureaucratic responsibilities. It started worrying about self-preservation rather than social change.

Panday and his posse have said that only those who were there for the birth of the UNC in 1988 can understand and criticize it. My apologies, I was 4 years old.

But I would wager my tuition fees that when Panday was walking door to door in constituencies through the 1970s and 1980s, he wasn’t talking about party discipline, hierarchy, or the need to exert strict control.

He was probably talking about building a movement together that would empower people to exert influence over the governance of their own lives. This is a message that crosses racial boundaries, it crosses class boundaries, and it crosses gender boundaries.

A party that jealously seeks to preserve its own status quo because it believes that only the anointed ones can move us forward, can criticize us, is a broken party and failed movement.

I understood the UNC in 2002 to still be a party of mass movement, and it is for that reason that the party stayed in my heart.

I understood the political dynamics that led to President Robinson arbitrarily and erroneously dismissing the incumbent UNC government in 2001 on the basis of ‘morality’ to disguise his personal vendetta.

Throughout my undergraduate degree and into my graduate degree, I would produce reports, write articles and analysis on Trinidadian politics, and generally do all that I could from abroad to help advance the movement I believed in so strongly as an impressionable 18 year old.

As my studies advanced, I was witnessing the slowing down of the movement I was so proud to be a part of, but never lost hope that it would re-energize itself once more.

As recent as 2007, I remember fighting passionately with another member of the Trinidadian Diaspora at a party I hosted. She supported COP, arguing that the UNC dream was dead and gone.

I would not accept this, and I certainly was not willing to turn my back on the leader who had inspired me so much. The movement had come to a grinding halt though, and I was stubbornly refusing to admit this.

It is not entirely the fault of the political leadership; it is also a function of the dirty politics in Trinidad, and a function of the process of party-institutionalization.

The party had grown older, but it had not matured.

The same material constraints Panday warned me about in 2002 – that as I got older, I would become bogged down by things that would make me less radical and more conservative – had happened to him and his party.

I never saw that young woman again, and this microcosm helps put into stark focus the brokenness of sticking to our traditional guns as we try to build a movement.

You don’t build a movement with sticks and stones; you build it with humility, service, and action.

When Panday called on us to send him into retirement in a blaze of glory in the last elections, I wanted to help him because I was grateful for his lifetime of service.

But this hubris, seeking a capstone in his career (which he had already achieved through being the Prime Minister) badly compromised the real objective of removing the PNM and healing our bleeding country.

Looking back at my fight with my Trinidadian comrade, why did I, a UNC supporter, and she, a COP supporter, drive each other away when we are chasing the same goal of struggling for a better Trinidad & Tobago for everyone?

This is when I abandoned all romanticizing of party loyalties, and realized that true social change does not come from the institutions of political parties.

It comes from people who are united to resist oppression and fight for their collective freedom. The structures of electoral democracy are far too easy to hijack.

When the practice of state-democracy becomes the system of oppression, people are forced to self-organize and render the structures of partisan politics irrelevant.

A real democracy would not require party loyalty and discipline - it would require an informed and compassionate population of peers.

A party must never shun new members, and it should never, never, shy away from criticism that will only help it mature.

Democracy is people power, but representative democracy as is being practiced today is elitist hypocrisy.

The UNC today is barely a shadow of the party it was when I was 4 years old.

Rather than staying true to the radical proposition that all those who seek a better Trinidad & Tobago could find an equal place in a mass movement of the people, the party has instead stayed true to the dogma of conservatism and self-preservation, grasping at the nostalgia of battles long-since fought.

I applaud Panday’s unwavering fighting spirit, but it is misplaced and misguided today.

Vicious attacks playing on divisive race politics or harmful gendered stereotypes is unbecoming of a leader and devastatingly disappointing to the now 26-year old radical, who still wants social change.

The rising sun of the UNC was meant to shine on all Trinidadians who wanted a better tomorrow. Today, conservatism ensures it only shines on the privileged few.

The people of Trinidad & Tobago who dared to believe in a mass movement are being denied what they so desperately deserve.

If the party continues to block the light of its own rising sun, it will condemn itself to the bitter resentment of everlasting night.
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Ajay Parasram is a researcher with the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. He holds a M.A. in Political Science from Carleton University.