THE PNCR HAS TO STOP THE WINDOW DRESSING

Jul 27, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The problems of the PNCR are of its own making. These difficulties that the party now faces were not created by the PPP nor were they the handiwork of external forces.
The PNCR should not look for political scapegoats. It should look towards itself and analyze its present state of affairs. The party is in bad shape, and this is no better exemplified by the unprecedented sight of empty chairs at the opening of its Biennial Congress.
The need for deep introspection is the most urgent task facing the party. Not the need for a ‘One Nation’ strategy for Guyana. This ‘One Nation’ strategy outlined in the party’s leader’s address to the present Congress of the party is just a label placed on an old discredited and outmoded idea that has become cliché. If the PNCR cannot hold its own party together, how can it become a credible advocate for national unity?
The PNCR has to stop bandying slogans around. It has to ensure that the party has direction and purpose. In order to do so, it has to define itself ideologically, because without this definition the party’s core values would amount to mere slogans, and its values cannot be translated into action.
The PNCR has to stop rebranding itself every few years. This is an attempt to present an image, a facade to the public. Instead of rebranding itself at the urgings of a self-serving business class and the party’s main financiers, the party needs to have a dispassionate examination of what it stands for and how what its stands for can be made relevant to the present times.
The PNCR can no longer rely on Cold War sympathies to bolster its finances. It can no longer use the PPP’s once leftist orientation as the basis to retain support both internally and amongst the world imperialist powers. It can no longer resort to electoral fiddling in order to gain political power. It can no longer align itself to bankrupt political and economic ideas. It is now no longer in power.
The PNCR has been out of power for more than 20 years. It has to reinvent itself in light of the passage of time, but this reinventing cannot be a superficial process, it must involve a deep process of introspection about the party’s past and a determination of what should be the core values.
The organizational confusion that the party now finds itself in is a product of its own lack of identity. Any party that does not know what its stands for cannot stand up for anything. It will fall to pieces, as is now evident. The PNCR has no compass, because it has not clarified since the death of Forbes Burnham and the end of the Cold War, just where it stands on the ideological continuum. No one knows if the PNC is now left of centre or whether it has left its own centre. The party has leaders, but it is rudderless.
Its constant rebranding, first from a vanguard party to one that jumped into bed with the bourgeois class, then to a nebulous remaking as the PNCR, then to a cosmetic alliance with APNU, has only sown confusion rather than purposefulness and direction. The party’s supporters are now more confused as to if the party’s colours are the traditional ones or whether it is now green, which is APNU’s colours.
The leap into APNU is all part of the party’s rebranding. It is also part of its attempt to run from its past, rather than objectively facing its many failures that this past represented. It is useless to speak about restoring the glory years of the PNC, when for all intents and purposes those glory years – if they existed – belonged to a different era. The party should instead be attempting to create new and more glorious achievements.
The PNCR is too wrapped up in leadership struggles. It needs to have a clear succession policy, so as to avoid Congress after Congress being overshadowed by leadership tussles. How can the party settle its internal differences and begin to address the many issues internal to the party that it needs address, when no one is clear as to who will be the next leader of the PNCR?
If the present Congress does anything of worth, it should be to identify once and for all a leader for the next ten years or, alternatively, a succession plan for the leadership of the party, so that the membership can have a clear idea of who will be at the helm in the medium term.
From here the party can move on to the more complex issues of deciding where and what it stands for and how best it can play a continued role in the politics of Guyana. Otherwise, the PPP will rule Guyana forever.

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THE PNCR HAS TO STOP THE WINDOW DRESSING

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