2 weeks Ago By Trevor Sudama
Except for what I have considered an objective assessment of the electoral prospects of the PNM and UNC, I have deliberately refrained from commenting on the 2025 election campaign. However, I feel compelled to respond to a statement by Mrs Kamla Persad- Bissessar made on a few occasions before and as recently as Saturday, April 5, 2025. It was a continuing and unwarranted attack on Basdeo Panday and his leadership of the UNC in the 21 years from its founding in 1989 to 2010.
Let me be clear about my long relationship with Panday. I have known him since 1964 when we were pursuing courses at the City of London College in Moorgate, London. Our association over the years included struggles on behalf of sugar workers and battles in the political arena in party and Parliament.
However, I had fundamental disagreements with him which ended in estrangement in 2001 and which will be fully elaborated in my memoirs. Nevertheless, despite his shortcomings which we all have, I always respected his tenacity of purpose, his forcefulness, resolve, commitment and political acumen as a leader, his unmatched oratory and persuasive rhetoric, his easy rapport with friends, strangers and foes alike and his huge contribution to the political development of this country. It was therefore with a sense of consternation and dismay that I read Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s attack on the UNC’s first 21 years of existence and the associated leadership of Basdeo Panday.
She asserted: “ It took me about 15 years to transform the UNC from a one-man show and hereditary aristocracy into a meritocracy.” (Express 5/4/2025) In all my years in the UNC I was not aware that it was an aristocracy, hereditary or otherwise. If the party was a one-man show under Panday, what may one ask is the UNC under Persad-Bissessar? As to being a meritocracy, one merely has to examine the qualifications, competence and performance of many of the leading lights of the UNC in parliamentary representation and debate or party mobilisation and expansion.
Many of the candidates selected for parliamentary representation are hardly inspiring and of nebulous backgrounds. Persad-Bissessar continues:-“I have purged the politics of caste, class, nepotism, family connections, segregation, discrimination and dynasty from the UNC.” According to her, she introduced the brave, new, beckoning world of the UNC to T&T.
However, it could not win an election without the substantial support of the COP in 2010 and with her vaunted purge lost a 29-seat majority in 2015 and also lost in 2020. While I was a colleague of hers from 1995 to 2001, I never once heard her raise and object to these multiple sins of the party. In fact, in those years Basdeo Panday was her infallible guru and mentor and she his foremost devotee.
If this was a front, it was sheer duplicity. When in 2001 we raised the issue of Panday’s autocratic behaviour, his inaction on corruption on the Piarco project and his facilitation of the over-weaning influence on party and Government by members of the parasitic oligarchy, Persad-Bissessar was unreservedly and truculently supportive of Panday. In fact, Persad-Bissessar was a virulent critic of Panday and the ULF as an alderman in the Siparia County Council in the mid-1980s and of Panday and the UNC in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a member of the NAR.
The irony, however, is that it was Panday who plucked her out of political oblivion in 1995 and gave her one of the safest seats in the UNC (Siparia), appointed her Attorney General, then as Minister of Legal Affairs and later as Minister of Education in the UNC Government of 1995-2000. In none of these positions did she distinguish herself. In 2007, when Panday was suspended from Parliament, he instructed the other Opposition MPs to vote for her as acting Leader of the Opposition in Parliament which, understandably, she fully exploited to her advantage.
Was this gender and caste discrimination by Panday? I have never known Panday to be caste conscious. If she argues that she was removed as Attorney General in favour of Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, also of Brahmin heritage, it must be noted that in terms of legal expertise, experience, competence and merit, the difference between Persad-Bissessar and Ramesh Maharaj is akin to chalk and cheese, The UNC was born out of the ULF and has had its roots in working class politics, though over the years it broadened its appeal. If the UNC is now purged of class does it mean that under Persad-Bissessar it is no longer committed to the welfare of the working class? Are the other classes who support the UNC do so out of national and patriotic motivation rather than class interests? When she speaks of nepotism and family connections, I believe reference is made to the approval of Panday’s brother, Subhas, as the UNC candidate for Naparima in 1991.
I was then a member of the screening committee and I can vouch that Subhas was the most qualified of the lot who submitted their names for consideration. Should he therefore have been excluded because he was Basdeo Panday’s brother? I have examined Persad-Bissessar’s indictments against Basdeo Panday and the UNC of 1989-2010 and found them to be spurious and without merit. The author is a former government minister.
