A New U.D.P. Deputy Leader will be Chosen on May 29th—Does Faber Have an Edge?

Patrick Faber

The date for a special convention to choose the First Deputy Leader of the United Democratic Party is set.  Delegates from across all thirty-one constituencies are expected to cast their votes in favor of either Patrick Faber or John Saldivar come May twenty-ninth.  The last Sunday in May was agreed upon by both candidates, as well as party executives who attended a lengthy meeting at the U.D.P. Secretariat over the weekend.  Going into Saturday’s meeting was a motion to vote on whether the existing delegate list should be discarded or kept intact.  Of course, doing away with the present list would have simply meant that new representatives would have to be sought.  Fortunately, the National Party Council opted to preserve the status quo which, according to Faber, gives him an advantage over his political opponent.

Patrick Faber, Candidate for Deputy Leader

“From the campaigning so far I do believe so and I think that my colleagues who were supporting John were really feeling the pinch.  They understood clearly that those delegates, in fact, were leaning towards me in many of their constituencies and so what really was afoot was a move to try to remove those delegates so that they don’t get to support me.  But you remember that these were the same delegates who went to Dangriga on March twentieth and in fact put in place the highest offices of the party: the leader, the second deputy leader, the chairman and vice chairman, and of course passed some very, very important resolutions.  And our position in the meeting was simply that we need to keep these people empowered because in fact they were registered for that convention and those delegates in fact then, were registered for a period of time and you can’t just change them three weeks later and the NPC [National Party Council], in its wisdom today, supported that and it was clear after the vote that that was the case and so now we’ve set the date and we’ve put the date forward the applications.  My applications, I can tell you, will be in first thing Monday morning and we go now to full campaign mode.  What you saw before was just previews of coming attractions.  I believe that we will garner even more support than we did prior to our meeting today and I feel very, very confident that even though when you look at the lineup before, you know, my colleague and opponent was basically putting out these endorsements from, like he put out the entire Cayo caucus.  Well the Cayo caucus is only five votes out of the five hundred and ninety votes and the people in the constituencies, the delegates, were saying, “Uh Uh, we wahn…ride wid Faber,” and those people get to stay.  So I am very confident of a win.  I think that we will be able to win quite comfortably and I ask people to support us because my agenda is not so much to become Deputy Prime Minister.  My agenda is to become deputy leader of this party so that we can organize it in such a way that we can continue the legacy of the Right Honorable Party Leader Dean Barrow and we can go on to continue to make history to win a fourth consecutive election victory for the United Democratic Party and so that we continue to deliver good governance to the people of our beloved nation.”