By Capil Bissoon From Caribbean News Now

The UNC’s internal election is finished and the preliminary results show a major landslide for incumbent political leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar.

Figures show just how popular she remains within the party. The last preliminary results show the vast margin. She has over 15,477, Roodal Moonilal around 1,466 and Vasant Bharath just over 1,102. In the 2010 leadership election, Kamla amassed 13,000 votes to Basdeo Panday’s 1,300.

In many heartland constituencies, both Moonilal and Bharath were unable collectively to obtain more than 100 votes.

The result was a vindication of numerous polls conducted in the run-up to last September’s elections that showed Kamla the only real asset the UNC possessed. Cabinet colleagues, especially those reputed to be members of the so-called “Cabal”, all polled within the margin of error. The “Kamla 2015” theme was in hindsight the only reason why the party was not devastated at the polls.

The fact some challenged her in the internal elections demonstrates an incomprehensible naivety, an unwillingness to make fact-based political judgments, or the result of giving too much credence to sycophantic supporters.

The challenge for the UNC and Mrs Persad-Bissessar in particular is to unite the party into a cohesive unit in which personal agendas are eliminated, widen the party’s middle class and swing voter appeal, develop a formidable party structure and cultivate strategic alliances with important interest groups.

While she does all this she has to be mindful there are very challenging by-elections and also THA and local government elections on the horizon. Not forgetting a possible general election, resulting from the party’s court petition on the last election.

Her best bet is to become battle ready as soon as possible and lower expectations of elections results, whatever they may be.

While doing all this, she has to internalize lessons learnt from the past five years.

Lesson number one is to avoid the trap of naming or anointing a successor. This leads to unnecessary power and financial resources being directed to the anointed by party financiers and others thinking about tomorrow. These resources in the hands of the unthinking or overly ambitious can have significant negative consequences for the party.

Mrs Persad-Bissessar has to adopt a posture of enlightened detachment from those around her, always focusing on the strategic goals of the party while paying close attention to performance and loyalty. She must encourage subordinates to be team players while opening channels for beneficial feedback to inform decision making.

Anyone in the UNC who does not understand that the party is greater than the individual must be strategically and graciously eliminated. The party’s history is replete with examples of destructive individualism gone awry.

Her second challenge is to completely eliminate cabals. Saturday’s elections provided her with a fortuitous opportunity to get rid of any type of cabal, which many feel crippled the party’s chances of moving forward.

As in everything, perception is reality and the general view of many and cultivated by Warner, the PNM and other detractors, was that a formidable cabal existed within the UNC that had agendas not in the party’s interest or its leader.

Cabals exist in every government. The UNC has a special responsibility to curb the power of future cabals. Absence of autonomous party structures failed to act as checks and facilitated the existence of formidable cabals.

Indeed, I understand a “new” cabal may be in the making and, if so, Mrs Persad-Bissessar must immediately stamp it out.

The third lesson is the need for strengthening party structures and ensuring arms of the party function. During the internal elections, the major complaint by those opposed to the current leadership was the party’s structures had atrophied.

Party structures are needed not only for fund raising to free the party from the grips of financiers, but to provide alternative inputs for decision making and an organized cadre of loyal foot-soldiers ready and able to become battle ready at a moment’s notice for elections.

The country is in for very interesting times.

Clearly the PNM had no plans to function if it won the last elections. It appears to be operating by vaps and extempore while blaming the last PP government for everything. Their mantra in Parliament and elsewhere is the paint the UNC as villains for every imaginable shortcoming on their part to come up with alternative viable plans for running the country and taking us out of this recession.

Their tag line is waste, corruption and mismanagement.

The UNC must unite to destroy this strategy. Moonilal, Bharath and others may be tasked with the redemptive job of being the party’s Rottweiler to demonstrate that the PNM government is clueless about governing our country and is Haitianizing our economy.

IMAGE: Capil Bissoon is a Trini-Canadian looking on at Trinidad and Tobago politics from a distance

For more on this story go to: http://www.caribbeannewsnow.com/topstory-Commentary%3A-Lessons-for-Kamla-28633.html