Race for P.U.P. leadership heats up
The battle over who will succeed Said Musa as leader of the Peoples’ United Party is heating up as the prospective candidates engage in exploratory talks with each other and with key party officials. Early favourite Francis Fonseca enjoys the support of the party hierarchy and can presumably count on whatever post election financial reserves remain under the control of the former P.M. and campaign chief Ralph Fonseca. That kind of cash incentive would be difficult to resist for hard pressed defeated standard bearers, most of whom still have more than a few unpaid bills. To take on Fonseca and the party’s old guard, the team of Mark Espat, John Briceño and Cordel Hyde will first have to decide whether Mark or Johnny will be the leader, and then take their fight directly to the delegates in the hope of convincing them that only fresh leadership, untainted by the past, can put the P.U.P. back in the public’s favour. And who are those all important delegates? Under the party rules the twenty-five or so members of the Executive will vote and each standard bearer will name one delegate for each one hundred votes he or she received in the recent elections. The six winning candidates each get to appoint an additional three delegates. Based on a total of forty-seven thousand P.U.P. votes, you are looking at a delegate count somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred. Of course no party anywhere relishes the prospect of a bloody fight on the convention floor. Both sides will try hard to negotiate but in the end the G-three will have to decide if they can live under what they consider to be a totally discredited leadership; at the same time Francis Fonseca and his sponsors must consider whether it’s worth it to win control of a dispirited and disjointed party that will have great difficulty winning any election in the near future.
All that assumes of course, that the new U.D.P. administration can deliver on even a modest portion of its campaign promises. It does not take a political scientist to know that all the good governance, honesty and transparency in the world means little if government cannot deliver a higher standard of living to the majority of its citizens. This week the newly minted Cabinet members were busy familiarising themselves with their ministries. Wasting no time, was Minister of National Security Carlos Perdomo, who addressed a meeting of police formation and sub formation commanders held in Belmopan. The U.D.P. has promised to significantly increase the size of the police force and provide it with improved equipment and technology.
