Looking Back on Hunte versus Cenac: Who Won?

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]ow ironic that the very people who today consider Neville Cenac wholly unworthy of the office of Governor General, ostensibly because he had thwarted some vaulting Labour Party ambitions 30 years ago, would have Grynberg and the other costly Kenny Anthony administration mysteries mothballed because “man dah en current no more.” This week they descended to disseminating fake news that the governor general had been hospitalized, doubtless designed to support their baseless claims that not only was Cenac unqualified for the job but also was too frail at age 78. (Can someone please tell where I might secure a copy of Qualifications For Governor General? I gather its tenth printing may have sold out two weeks ago.)

Just before I sat down to write this piece, I thought back to my recently resurrected report of 13 June 1987, wherein I revealed my shock at discovering most of the people I accosted in La Grace, Augier, Laborie and Saltibus, compared to their Castries brethren and their performed outrage, were relatively unbothered by Cenac’s change of political allegiance two days earlier. Why, then, is there this lingering whiff of negativism toward the resurfaced Cenac that has inspired questions never asked in relation to earlier occupiers of Government House?

Consider this: chances are the progenitors of today’s 25-year-olds had not yet been introduced in 1987; our 30-year-olds were infants; 40-year-olds not yet teenagers. The group comprises the majority of our population. So who are the perpetuators of the anti-Cenac sentiment?  At a guess, I’d say an amplified barely alive minority whose dream of defeating John Compton had come so near yet remained so far. Oh, I mustn’t forget the current House opposition whose immediate ambitions rely on the imminent demise of Allen Chastanet, and for whom every move he makes and, for all I know, every breath he takes, are not-to-be-missed opportunities for pointless chaos.   

I’ve also been considering Neville Cenac’s stated reasons for crossing the floor. When first proffered, they seemed to center on his relationship with Julian Hunte. By Cenac’s own admission they had worked well together as city councilors. They were “like brothers,” despite that one was a member of the Saint Lucia Labour Party and the other mayor and a frontline UWP star. They were later founding members of the fated St. Lucia Labour Action Movement. Following the 1982 debacle and consequent elections that returned John Compton’s UWP to the House with 14 seats to Labour’s three (Hunte contested as an independent candidate in Central Castries and ate dust) Cenac had engineered Hunte’s leadership of the Labour Party. This involved a change in the party’s constitution. But after all of that, by Cenac’s dramatic recall in parliament, Hunte had proved undeserving. He had tried surreptitiously to unseat him in Laborie, denied him campaign funds, sought in vain to impose himself on the senate with Cenac’s connivance, blahblahblah.

Cenac had also maintained that while his heart belonged to Labour, its leader had made the party his private property and by his treachery driven him out. He declared Hunte an ingrate; a dictator.

Hunte, Hunte, Hunte. If serious ideological differences were also in the bouillion, Cenac kept the pot to himself. Now I wonder: Did Neville Cenac more than once misjudge Hunte? Or did the circumstances of 1982-1987 leave Cenac no room for other maneuvers. He was Leader of the Opposition in ’82, that’s true. But his party had been decimated. Peter Josie—who successfully contested that year’s election against the UWP featherweight Eldridge Stephens—had by then lost much of his luster, thanks mainly to his fall-out with George Odlum. He’d also lost much of the Labour Party’s support. The only other Labour man in the House was Cecil Lay who was, well, Cecil Lay. Not built to lead.

Arranging Hunte’s leadership may have seemed to Cenac his only option. And, truth be told, Hunte had done a fine job of breathing new life into the SLP carcass, cleansing it of what he considered debris, and while attracting more viable election material. Might he have won the elections in 1987 had he pretended to play ball instead of political cat-and-mouse with Neville Cenac? Might he better have waited until after a triumphant run in 1987 before off-loading Cenac?

And what about Cenac? He had prospered from his defection, politically at any rate. He was rewarded in ’87 with the ministry of his choice: Foreign Affairs. If after ’87 he seemed to vanish from the political radar, last week he certainly returned with a bang.

As for Hunte, after ’87 he never tasted another election victory. In 1997, his old party reduced him to ashes when he contested the year’s elections as an independent candidate, then made him Saint Lucia’s representative at the U.N.—for which George Odlum took credit. Hunte also collected a papal award for his work while at the U.N. Another run for the SLP in 2005 again saw him eating more dirt, this time at the feet of the UWP’s Lenard Montoute.

By all accounts the new governor general Sir Emmanuel is close to completing a book that doubtless will answer the otherwise unanswerable questions. As for Hunte, who was knighted in the time of Kenny Anthony, his appearances at SLP events are these days few and far between. Perhaps he, too, is writing a book!

One more thing: how many in Saint Lucia know how Sir Emmanuel became widely known as Chandele Mol? Who named him so? No surprise, it turns out that the man named himself. While discussing with a friend the sorry state of “fair Helen” Cenac prescribed a good rubdown with chandelle mol. “And I am Helen’s chandelle mol.”

We shall see!