AS THE three-month-old People’s Partnership Government (PPG) of Trinidad and Tobago prepares for its first post-election ministerial strategising retreat next week Thursday, the three-year-old Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) administration is increasingly being pushed on the defensive to call an early national election.
If the fledgling PPG administration of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar faces the early challenge of a critical assessment of how to avoid conflicting messages/positions among cabinet ministers reaching the public, the situation is quite different in Kingston.
There, Prime Minister Bruce Golding is confronted with a serious political credibility challenge that seems unlikely to disappear before a new general election – whenever called, and not constitutionally due for another two years.
It has to do with that haunting episode of Golding’s initial involvement with a United States law firm to help his government in lobbying efforts to frustrate the extradition to America of the infamous drug lord of Tivoli Gardens, Christopher “Dudus” Coke.
That extradition has, of course, occurred. However, as the “don” of Tivoli Gardens in Golding’s West Kingston garrison constituency awaits trial, a statement made in parliament by the Prime Minister claiming non-involvement of the government but rather by his ruling JLP, continues to taunt his veracity.
The surfacing this past weekend of email messages, obtained by the Jamaica Gleaner under the country’s Access to Information Act, has made it abundantly clear that the intervention with the American law firm of Manatt, Phelphs and Phillips, in the extradition case of Coke was done on behalf of the government.
For Portia Simpson-Miller, this was politically intoxicating news. Her own spell as Jamaica’s first woman prime minister that came to an end in September 2007, was comparatively shortlived towards the end of a fourth consecutive term in government for the PNP.Portia’s poll alert She told a convention of her party last weekend, while high on optimism, to be on “election alert”.
The PNP leader was determnined to press ahead with the party’s earlier call for an independent probe into all aspects of the case involving the extradition of Coke and Golding’s administration.
It is doubtful that Golding would buckle to the PNP’s demand for such an independent probe. But the alternative could be equally difficult to ignore.
However, in a curious way, the Golding administration may find some respite from a political corrpution case that also haunts the PNP.
It is known as the “Trafigura scandal of 2006” and relates to a highly controversial financial arrangement between the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica (PCJ) and the Dutch firm of Trafigura Beheer from which the PNP was to have been a beneficiary.
As Jamaicans were digesting the implications for Golding’s administration by the unearthing of incriminating email messages in the extradition case of “Dudus” Coke, there came the unwelcome news for the PNP:
It was the decision on Monday by Contractor General Greg Christie that there are sufficient evidence, on the basis of an extensive probe, to institute a case of “criminal offence” against the PNP’s former parliamentarian and executive Colin Campbell, who was at the centre of the so-called “Trafigura affair”.
The PNP’s Simpson-Miller is, however, determined to make maximum politics from the confirmation by the email messages that Prime Minister Golding had “deliberately misled” parliament and the nation when he sought to shield his administration from the lobbying initiatives on behalf of the drug kingpin Coke.
She thinks that she has Golding on the political run and intends to maintain pressure to “prevent him remaining as prime minister”. Kamla’s retreat Meanwhile, in Port-of-Spain, Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar, just back from a controversy-laden visit to New York, would be anxious to get some problems out of the way ahead of the PPG’s first national budget presentation on September 8.
One such challenging issue would be the apparent haste by a few of her close and very senior cabinet colleagues – including Attorney General Annan Ramlogan and Works and Transport Minister Jack Warner – to compete for influence with the public to disclose or comment on sensitive matters – even before deliberations at cabinet.
The prime minister has wisely been maintaining a public silence on this scenario, perhaps anxious to avoid conveying any impression of a “maximum leader” role, one that has been a pattern under the legendary Eric Williams and, strangely adopted, for a while, by Patrick Manning.
We must await the outcome of the coming retreat.
