‘It is the competition for ideas that builds the party. What you have to try and do is to keep the competition within reasonable bounds so it doesn’t lead to people cussing out each other and leaving’
Former PNC finance minister Carl Greenidge feels that personality politics has caused the internal conflict that has plagued his party in recent years, and says the party’s leadership has to be more efficient in fulfilling a mandate from the wider membership to utilize all the human resources available.
“Well the difficulty and even the current problems facing the party turn too much on personalities,” Greenidge said in a recent interview with this newspaper. He noted that while politics has to do with personality, “successful and fruitful politics is based upon issues”.
In recent years, several members of the PNCR have had publicized disputes with party leader Robert Corbin while others have resigned from the party, including several of those which constituted the Reform group of the party. Factions have also arisen with the formation of ‘Team Alexander’ which supported Vincent Alexander’s aborted challenge to Corbin’s leadership in 2007 and later on the Winston Murray Support Group, which had been campaigning for the now deceased former deputy prime minister to be the party’s presidential candidate. Following the death of Murray in November, the group supported the candidature of Greenidge.
The need to change from a politics of personalities to one of issues, Greenidge said has been acknowledged by the five persons who had contested to be the party’s presidential candidate and by the wider membership. He said the will of the membership was clear at the party’s last General Council held in May. “In the recent General Council on the 21st May, members called upon the party to make the public aware that they must use the skills available to the party – all the skills,” he said, According to him, this included skills within the party and those on the periphery of the party. “Those who are active now and those who’ve been active in the past, bring them in so that they contribute to its thought process and operationalizing of ideas,” he said.
Harmonized
Greenidge said the onus is now on the party’s leadership which includes the party leader, its presidential candidate David Granger and the Central Executive Committee to ensure this happens. “I think that the party leadership cannot say that it has perfectly harmonized its actions with those that the membership is calling for,” he said, adding that “there is a way to go between what the leadership is doing and what the membership is calling for.”
He stressed that this was not a sign of division within the party nor was it a war between the membership and the leadership. “It is a sign that the leaderships needs… to catch up and to be more efficient or more effective,” he stated.
Greenidge emphasized too that a lot of the conflict in recent times had to do with the way the party made decisions and not the broader goals. “A number of the divisions within the party have to do not with the broader goals, they have to do with the way the party, itself, makes its decisions. That is where a lot of the internal problems have arisen in the past,” he said.
According to him, issues such as “how elections were run, how responsibilities are assigned, how discipline is enforced, whether rules are applicable to everyone,” were among some of the troublesome issues. “And the fact that it could have dealt with these, in the way that it dealt with them, and to have arrived at a candidate’s process, which is clearly far more transparent than the PPP’s…that has arrived out of the problems of the party,” he said.
“Don’t see conflict within a political party as the end of a process. It’s part of the political process,” the former finance minister said. “It is the competition for ideas that builds the party. What you have to try and do is to keep the competition within reasonable bounds so it doesn’t lead to people cussing out each other and leaving,” he added.
Since narrowly losing to Granger in his bid to become the PNCR’s presidential candidate, Greenidge told Stabroek News that he has been working with the Central Executive of the party. His availability has been hindered by his frequent travels to and from Barbados as he seeks to relocate to Georgetown. But when present, he has looked at ways in which the party can move forward and is part of the committee looking at the elections strategy.
Questioned about the involvement of the other presidential candidates, Greenidge admitted that there were challenges in this area. “If you have people compete for a position, it is perhaps unrealistic to expect that immediately after that competition that they would suddenly be running, you know, in sync as a team without hitches and problems,” he opined. Noting that while the process to select a candidate was a transparent and welcomed one, not enough attention was paid to what would happen after the selection. “I don’t think sufficient attention was focused, if at all, on the subsequent period,” he said. “And that is a matter that still has to be resolved in a way …so that you have a team, as opposed to an arrangement where there are a number of institutions and a number of individuals in which institutions are found,” he said.
“If you don’t see enough of the nominees then you have to look largely at the mechanism that is there. And I think that mechanism certainly needs attention and there needs to be an appreciation of the value of a team,” Greenidge stated. “I don’t want to apportion blame but between the institutions and the officials more work needs to be done to make better use of the skills of the candidates and in order to honour the obligations that the party has and the agreement that was made with the candidates,” he continued.
Meanwhile, asked about the candidacy of Granger in the event that he became the candidate for the Joint Opposition Political Parties (JOPP), Greenidge said that Granger would be expected to uphold the principles of the party in their entirety.
“I don’t have any reason to expect that he would not do so [in spite] of wherever he may have started from in terms of his own interest and policies,” Greenidge said.
