A FEW months ago, Professor Selwyn Cudjoe offered stirring advice to Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley about his successor.
“The PM must be careful about imposing (Stuart) Young or any member of the moneyed class on the party, when the party’s base consists mostly of Black people,” Cudjoe wrote.
The professor urged Rowley “to recognise how important Black people are to the sustenance of the party.”
He had earlier argued that “the needs of the Black group (are) being left unattended or neglected.”
Cudjoe contended that of the 220,000 votes the PNM got in the 2020 general election, 190,000 came from Black people.
His passionate advice came against a widening gap between rich and poor, with a tiny minority owning more than 80 per cent of wealth and more business corporations than ever raking in billion-dollar profits.
But Rowley had already invested much political patronage on Young and the drumbeat was quickening in the PNM.
A deep-pocket party financier funded a poll that found much disenchantment with Rowley’s leadership and Fitzgerald Hinds’ stewardship in National Security.
There were whispers of a slackening of electoral funding from traditional sources.
At the same time, Foster Cummings – supremely placed as PNM general secretary and Minister of Youth Development – was leading an insurgent movement.
Kareem Marcelle in Laventille West was a vanguard of the campaign to replace the tarnished old guard with candidates more in step with the masses.
“The party has lost touch with the small people,” a Beetham activist said in a bitter voice note.
Rowley put off the planned December party convention and got Hinds to stand down after narrowly winning constituency nomination.
The declining economy and headaches over the cross-border natural gas fields, along with personal health concerns added to Rowley’s woes.
Leaving succession to the PNM could have landed Cummings in office in a party coup of sorts.
So Rowley strategically timed his departure, and named a successor even in the midst of a security state of emergency.
This is unlike Justin Trudeau, who put Canada’s leadership issue in the party’s hands.
If Young leads the PNM to electoral victory, he would be assured at least five years in the party leader’s seat as he manages economic and security crises.
Rowley has become the first PNM leader to identify a successor.
The incoming party boss has been seeking to remake his image.
But his crudity in Parliament last October led the Express to ask whether “boorishness is part of his character” or he is driven by his status as Rowley’s “anointed Minister of Everything.”
With the national poll mere months away, could Rowley sell this relative political newcomer as a protector and advocate of the common man?
Would the urban masses trust a “member of the moneyed class” to take them out of hardship and to provide them with opportunities?
Would the PNM flock rally around Young the way they did with George Chambers in 1981?
There are more questions than answers, as Johnny Nash sang.
