‘credibility’ and ‘errors’
Analysis
THE PEOPLE of Jamaica are intensely focused at present on the fate of Prime Minister Bruce Golding’s government following his recent bizarre admission of having personally misled them on a highly controversial national issue.
And across in Trinidad and Tobago, his fellow CARICOM Head of Government, Prime Minister Patrick Manning, has been driven on the back foot as he struggles through fierce campaigning to save his own administration at the new general election in nine days time.
Consistent with established norms of the Westminster-style multi-party democracy to which governing and opposition parties in CARICOM generally subscribe, a Head of Government who felt compelled to confess giving false information on a matter of grave national importance — as done by Golding — can expect to face a no-confidence motion, having damaged his personal credibility and that of the administration he leads.
At the time of writing, while Opposition Leader, Portia Simpson-Miller was emotionally engaged in a sort of political war cry about lack of confidence in the Prime Minister, there was no indication of her party initiating a formal no-confidence motion against Mr. Golding in the House of Representatives.
Jamaicans, CARICOM nationals in and out of the region, and others beyond would be aware of the circumstances that resulted in Golding having to confess to his troubling error of judgment by the personal role played to secure the services of a United States law firm (Manat, Phelps and Phillips).
It had to do with the worsening controversial case involving Washington’s requested extradition to the USA of the infamous dealer in drugs and guns, Christopher Coke, better known as ‘Dudus’.
Prime Minister Golding’s severe political pain, which currently threatens the survival of his 33-month-old administration, the first he has ever led, has evidently greatly energised the PNP.
Its frontline parliamentarian in the crusade against the government’s handling of the ‘Dudus’ case — Peter Philips (a former National Security Minister) — has undoubtedly done much to bring about Prime Minister Golding’s deep political agony.

T&T scene

In Trinidad and Tobago, where Prime Minister Manning felt obliged to squander — even before reaching mid-term — a five-year mandate won in an electoral landslide in November 2007 — his political mantra for the May 24 poll is that the anti-PNM ‘People’s Partnership’ coalition, led by Kamla Persad-Bissessar, is doomed to fall apart in government.
In his anxiety to woo support for his prediction about the longevity of a UNC/Congress of People (COP) and others ‘partnership’ in government, Manning has gone even further by forecasting also the collapse, in one year, of Britain’s first coalition government since the Second World War.
For her part, Persad-Bissessar — the first woman to head a major party in Trinidad and Tobago, who  appears extremely confident of replacing Manning as the new Prime Minister — has been joyfully speaking this past week about Prime Minister David Cameron-led coalition government as having “gone the way set by us…” Read “us” as the grand ‘People’s Partnership’.
However, such enthusiasm must contend with some harsh reality, notably, that the perceived popular surge towards the coalition force she leads could run into troubled waters with a simplistic assumption that the massive electoral defeat suffered in 1986 by Manning when he called a snap general election could be repeated in 2010.
The more so now with a woman as the coalition’s prime ministerial candidate. Her literal tearing up of the PNM’s election manifesto last week, within days of its official release by Manning, may have been a popular and entertaining act for the benefit of the more emotional and aggressive advocates of ‘time for change’.
But it was hardly an intellectual response. And in the absence of the availability, up to the time of writing, of its own election manifesto, the ‘People’s Partnership’ crusade has to avoid undermining its own credibility in what it offers for ‘change’ .
That is, in terms of the new political culture and quality of governance that Trinidad and Tobago needs at this very challenging period, not just for Trinidad and Tobago, but  for countries across the Caribbean Community.
At the same time, Prime Minister Manning may have unwittingly revealed his own nervousness about the likelihood of the UNC-led ‘People’s Partnership’ succeeding in achieving what the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats did last week in Britain.
For different reasons, therefore, both Prime Ministers Golding and Manning are seemingly gripped by agonising political errors of their own creation — much to the delight of their opponents!
In admitting to his “own mistakes,” Manning said he was likely to commit more, since he was just “a human being.”
I guess Golding, having been candid in coming forward with his confession, could make a similar case; and you, the reader, and I, the writer can perhaps concur. But for him, as it is for Manning, ultimately, it is the judgment, the verdict, of the people, and specifically the electorate, that really matters.