Column: Campaign contradictions - the Peter O'Connor Column

No one expected this to be an intellectual or even “decent” campaign season.

Parliament was dissolved specifically to preclude debate on the issues of the nation, and revert instead to mudslinging and blatant lies from election platforms.

We need to look at some of what is being said and done, so that we can begin to get some perspective about what is really happening around us.

So I want to speak to those of you who are not up front and centre at the feet of the politicians.

You who have no water. You who spend five hours a day, with your children, stuck in traffic. You who have family turned away from the hospitals. You who had a family member who had been murdered. You who have watched your country burn these past weeks. You who see that the present government cannot even collect garbage.
You who are waiting to see what the Property Tax is going to take from you.

What do you think of the level of this campaign so far?

For a man who wanted to prevent the opposition from “slandering” him in parliament, Patrick Manning has certainly come out swinging with his own slanderous and untruthful ranting as he mounts his platforms each campaign night.

We have heard nothing from Manning in defense of his regime, or in terms of what he will do for the country should we put intelligence out of our thoughts and re-elect the PNM.

What we have heard from this allegedly “Born Again” leader is scandalous innuendo about drunkenness on the other side. And when he was quite correctly reprimanded for this, he put on his “innocent persona” claiming that he had only been referring to a song being played on the UNC platforms.

Only trouble with that is the UNC and the media have said the song in question had not been played. Is this a contradiction, or a lie exposed?

Manning, having wrapped himself in his “victim” shroud as a campaign tactic, is learning what all “victim syndrome” people eventually learn: People want winners, not victims, for their leaders.

Having been booed by his own supporters, he has finally realized that his people are “vilifying” him and he blames the media, not his own arrogance, for this. The criticism he has been getting has been coming at him for a long time.

Remember, more people voted against the PNM in 2007 than voted for them. But Manning failed to acknowledge how unpopular he was becoming, and not because of us being critical of him, but because of his own actions.

Then, suddenly on the campaign, Manning attempted to link Winston Dookeran with the Muslimeen, and criticizes Dookeran’s leadership abilities.

It is time that Manning is exposed for his dishonest efforts to link Dookeran with a “unity government” during the 1990 coup attempt.

Manning knows—but you have not yet been told, because Manning is suppressing this—that there was never any intention to make any deal with Abu Bakr and the Muslimeen during the siege of parliament.

At no point was the government outside of the Red House considering any unity government with Bakr. They were considering two options—“attack with full Force”, and a plan to promise but withhold amnesty, claiming that the proposed amnesty was agreed under duress (a position upheld by the House of Lords).

Winston Dookeran helped to formulate the latter, and went on to lead this country through its darkest hour.

And where was Manning?

He had the left the Red House “fortuitously” (his own words!) only 45 minutes before the murderous attack. He never offered to assist his beleaguered nation, nor did he ever express any sympathy for the persons held hostage and killed.

To this day he has never condemned the atrocity. And he continues to slander Winston Dookeran’s name in this issue?

Where are the voices of senior lawyers who were part of all the discussions and drafting the “amnesty”?

Where is the voice of Herbert Atwell who was a NAR Senator at the time, and part of those frightening times and the negotiations to rescue the country?

I am calling upon the people involved in rescuing T&T in those dark days to speak out now—on what Dookeran did, and on where was Manning?

Herbert Atwell, will you speak now, or when you are summoned to the Inquiry? And I close this week by asking Mustapha Hamid to explain what he meant by his pejorative statements in St. Augustine when he said repeatedly that if the UNC was elected all the jobs and favours would go to members of “that clan”?

That sounded very much like Margret Thatcher’s “kith and kin” comment about Apartheid South Africa back in the 1980’s. Explain yourself, Hamid.

Peter O'ConnorPeter's columns also appear in the Sunday Newsday newspaper