The To­ba­go Peo­ple’s Par­ty (TPP) could face sig­nif­i­cant gov­er­nance chal­lenges in man­ag­ing the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) in the ab­sence of a for­mal op­po­si­tion, ac­cord­ing to po­lit­i­cal sci­en­tist Prof Hamid Ghany.

Speak­ing on CNC3’s elec­tion pro­gramme To­ba­go De­cides on Mon­day evening, Ghany said the elec­tion out­come un­der­scored the win­ner-take-all na­ture of the first-past-the-post elec­toral sys­tem, par­tic­u­lar­ly in small Caribbean leg­is­la­tures. He not­ed that such a clean sweep would have been far less like­ly un­der a pro­por­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion sys­tem, in which seats are al­lo­cat­ed based on the per­cent­age of votes cast.

While the re­sult strength­ens the TPP’s po­si­tion nu­mer­i­cal­ly, Ghany said it al­so presents an up­hill task for ef­fec­tive gov­er­nance.