The Tribune

Michael Pintard is no stranger to the political damage a recording can do.

In 2016, amid controversy involving recorded conversations, he resigned as FNM chairman and from the Senate. His political career survived. The memory, however, makes this latest episode particularly ironic.

Fate indeed has a cruel sense of humour.

Over the weekend, the Free National Movement gathered for its “Family Affair” conclave. The public presentation was one of fellowship, unity and a party preparing to find its way forward.

Then came the recordings.

Whatever comfort the leadership hoped to draw from the weekend, the leaked exchanges revealed a family with some very uncomfortable questions to answer.

Chief among them was whether the party had assembled to examine its election defeat honestly or to find a way of explaining it without requiring meaningful accountability at the top.

Long Island MP Dr Andre Rollins was plainly unwilling to accept the presentation without scrutiny.

The Jamaican consultants brought in to assess the defeat had singled out five constituencies as being on a “knife’s edge”. Dr Rollins questioned the selection and the emphasis.

“We are here to do a post mortem,” he said. “We are not here to do a prospective analysis going forward.”

Dr Rollins is right.

An examination of why a party lost must begin with what voters rejected, what the campaign failed to communicate and whether the leadership inspired confidence.

It cannot become an exercise in warning potential challengers about the vulnerability of their own seats while treating the leader’s position as a separate consideration.

Whether that was the intention of the presentation remains a question. That it invited such suspicion tells us something about the distrust within the organisation.

Dr Rollins also challenged the description of Mr Pintard as an asset in Grand Bahama while questioning the treatment of the party’s declining support there. The consultants themselves reportedly identified Mr Pintard as the least popular of the three main party leaders, while pointing to wider failures in messaging, candidate visibility and planning.

Those wider failures deserve examination. A political party is larger than one man.

But leadership cannot claim authority over the campaign and then become merely one small consideration when the result is assessed.

The person who asks to lead must also be prepared to answer for where he has taken the organisation.

Dr Rollins’s most important intervention concerned the willingness to confront the truth.

“What I’m trying to do is, we will not get to where we need to go and want to go if we are afraid of the truth and if we are afraid to discuss the full issues.”

Quite so Dr Rollins.

Party supporters are entitled to ask difficult questions. They gave their time, their money and their credibility to the campaign. They should not now be treated as the explanation for a leadership image they were expected to sell.

Nor should disagreement automatically be dressed up as disloyalty.

A party that hopes to govern must demonstrate that it can tolerate scrutiny within its own ranks. Unity built on silence lasts only until somebody presses record.

There is also a larger national interest here.

The Bahamas needs an effective Opposition capable of scrutinising the Government, developing credible policies and presenting voters with a serious alternative.

That work becomes harder when the Opposition remains consumed by questions about its own leadership and whether its internal processes can be trusted.

Mr Pintard may believe he remains the best person to lead. He is entitled to make that assumption. That does however not make it fact.

His colleagues and supporters are equally entitled to test his leadership.

The answer must come through an honest assessment and a credible democratic process.

The irony is that a gathering intended to bring the family together has allowed the country to hear its arguments through the walls.

The recordings did not create those divisions.

They made them audible.