OMAR Davies threw his hat in the ring at the 11th hour yesterday, forcing a postponement for the chairman of the People’s National Party’s important Region Three and apparently sparking deep resentment among delegates who claim that the finance minister is being foisted on them by the party hierarchy.

Region Three embraces 15 constituencies in Kingston and St Andrew and has for eight years been chaired by Paul Burke, the one-time firebrand leader of the party’s youth wing — PNPYO.

Burke had signalled that he was stepping down and up to Saturday it appeared that it would be an unopposed shoo-in for Allan Rickards, who helped manage Burke’s campaign when he ran for the post in 1995. At the time, Burke beat Colin Campbell, who was then a junior minister and the representative for Eastern St Andrew.

But yesterday it emerged that Davies, the parliamentary representative for South St Andrew who has held the finance portfolio since 1994, was interested in the job.

In the effort to get his name on the ballot, delegates, meeting at the Jamaica Conference Centre in downtown Kingston, voted more than seven-to-one to postpone the vote by a week. One hundred and fifty were in favour of the postponement, 17 abstained and three voted no.

“Nominations came in late, so they need to have the kind of preparation to ensure that all the delegates have a chance to know who are the candidates that are in the running,” PNP vice-president Peter Phillips told the Observer after the meeting.

Phillips had earlier addressed the conference.

However, delegates confirmed that the session was stormy and that some delegates were unhappy with the late developments.

“The meeting was hot-tempered at times,” one delegate said afterwards. “Party supporters in the region want Allan Rickards. He has more time to dedicate to the job. The party hierarchy wants to foist Omar Davies upon us and that was a bone of contention.”

Declared another: “They always want to manipulate things. Is it about the will of the people or the big man?”

Neither Davies nor Rickards was available for comment last night.

It was not the first time that Rickards has had to watch his ambition for the leadership of Region Three run into obstacles. In 2001 Burke had signalled that he would not run for the post, setting up a contest between Rickards and former Central Kingston MP, Ronnie Thwaites. Burke, however, changed his mind just before the conference.

It is widely believed that Davies has more than cast an eye on the post-Patterson leadership of the PNP. It has been speculated that his January controversial remarks when he admitted to allowing some expenditures to go ahead in the lead up to last October’s general election, rather than cut back to slim the fiscal deficit, was a bit of populist rhetoric to party faithful to help build his grass-roots credentials.

Davies also recently confirmed that he would support former general secretary and development minister Paul Robertson’s run for one of the party’s four vice presidential positions at the PNP’s annual conference later this month. The current vice presidents are Phillips, the national security minister; Portia Simpson Miller, the local government minister; Roger Clarke, the agriculture minister; and Dr Karl Blythe, the former water and housing minister who left the Cabinet under a cloud last year when an inquiry into the operation of the huge overruns in the government’s shelter programme Operation PRIDE characterised him as an interventionist minister who ran the scheme like a “brotherhood”.

A review of the inquiry’s finding by former solicitor general Dr Ken Rattray raised questions about the approach of the inquirers and appeared to vindicate Blythe. But Blythe is thought to have hurt himself with a letter to Patterson that was interpreted as demanding a recall to the Cabinet. He was also critical about how the party had treated him in the aftermath of the inquiry and the Rattray findings.

Concerns by Davies over the management of Operation PRIDE and the National Housing Development Corporation (NHDC) which it falls were believed to have played an important role in Patterson’s decision to bow to Opposition pressure for the inquiry leading to the fall of Blythe.

Burke has strong influence with PNP grassroots supporters in the Corporate Area, but that has not been enough to hold the party’s strength in this key area where the middle classes have either bolted from the party or gone passive.

In the 1997 general election the PNP won 10 of the region’s 15 seats, but lost three of those to the Jamaica Labour Party in last October’s general election. In the city’s local government, the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation (KSAC), the PNP won 27 seats in the 40-member chamber in 1998. In the latest election in June it won 18 seats.

Davies has in recent months made no secret of the deterioration of the PNP’s middle class base and has stressed that this is area of support that the party had to win back to regain its primary position as the national movement.