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Poor showing by Opposition Leader

Express

THE one constant about Opposition Leader Basdeo Panday is his inability to change. If in government he was given to the smug smile rather than the spitting snarl in opposition, it is just that the latter tends to take precedence over the former. Back in the country after a month-long Christmas holiday in London, his first public utterance was an attack on the gathered media, whom he accused of putting him into opposition.

Amazingly, Mr Panday, during all the time he must have spent licking his wounds, never once submitted himself to honest introspection, preferring to look for blame not in the many mis-steps, to put it mildly, he made during his tumultuous period of governance, but in the media, whose major sin must have been not to turn a blind eye, among other things, to his government’s corrupt goings-on. No matter that many of the charges came from the mouths of his erstwhile cronies, not least his former attorney-general and comrade-in-arms, Mr Ramesh Maharaj.

Hardly had the dust settled on that sandstorm when Mr Panday managed to raise the malicious ante by charging the man who had bested and ousted him, Prime Minister Patrick Manning, was linked to the Al Qaeda organisation. What Mr Panday was seeking to do, of course, was to draw a crooked line between the local Jamaat-al-Muslimeen and the notorious terrorists.

Now we have for our own part strongly criticised Mr Manning’s apparent political embrace of the Jamaat, but it is a wild stretch of the imagination to leap from that to the embrace of Al Qaeda. Moreover, Mr Panday must think that the whole country is suffering from collective amnesia if he believes any of us, PNM, UNC or neutral, has forgotten his own embrace of the Jamaat group, it appears, that always seems to have a hold on all our leading political men.

Seeking to align himself with the health sector’s “sick” doctors, the better to keep up the pressure on the administration, Mr Panday found himself engaged in a manner of doublespeak that would have been embarrassing to any other politician but him. Reminded by the media of his “criminal” behaviour stance on the teachers when they struck out during his tenure, he sought refuge in a fumble of words that betrayed that all he was about was self-serving bluster.

Mr Panday has reneged on his promise to surrender the leadership of the UNC and clearly intends to use the party’s coming conference as a triumphant endorsement of his leadership. But his party’s and, indeed, the country’s hopes will be ill-served by the kind of flick of the wrist, shooting-from-the-hip mouthings that define his particular brand of politicsspeak.

The UNC’s membership and, indeed, the country at large deserve to have an opposition that can credibly be seen as an alternative government. Surely, it is not too much to ask of the Opposition Leader that he demonstrates that he is capable, both of the thinking and the industry necessary for someone who can credibly be hailed as an alternative prime minister?

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