THE AFC NATIONAL CONFERENCE AND ELECTIONS

Dec 06, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The Alliance for Change (AFC) holds its National Conference today. It is an important gathering. The Conference will no doubt be asked to chart the way forward for the party, including the near future.
That near future is likely to see elections. With the doors of political compromise shut tightly, it is almost certain that the President will early in the New Year announce a roadmap that will conclude with General and Regional Elections.
It is the President who has to name the date for elections. But in so doing he also has to consider the readiness of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) to undertake polls. GECOM has just commenced another round of registration and each round runs for quite a few weeks. When this round of registration is completed, there will be a need for the eligible names to be added to the national list of registrants, and from this list, for the preliminary list of electors to be produced. After this, there has to be claims and objections to sanitize the list before a final list is produced.
The AFC may therefore feel that elections are some months away, even if parliament is summoned and the party is able to carry through with its threat to pass a no-confidence motion against the government.
The AFC has to be cognizant of this reality and therefore, it is more than likely that the party will use the National Conference to develop its strategies for the forthcoming elections, whenever these are held.
To not do so would be to Court disaster because the government, you can bet, will be monitoring the developments at the National Conference of the AFC, and if the AFC does not address an election strategy at its National Conference, the government may rush to call snap elections to take advantage of the AFC’s failure to use its National Conference to ready its membership for elections.
The PPP may do this even if it feels that GECOM is not ready, because what stands in the way of the PPP winning a majority is not APNU. In a month of Sundays, APNU can never defeat the PPP, never. The AFC cannot either, but it can win sufficient support to deny the PPP a majority and hold the balance of power within the National Assembly as it did in the 10th parliament. The PPP’s primary concern is therefore the AFC.
Obviously, of course, the AFC knows that the government is thinking about elections in the second half of 2015. But they should also consider that the government is thinking that the AFC knows how it is thinking and therefore, the government could come with another plan such as a snap election within three months. This is why it would be foolhardy for the AFC to not use its National Conference to strategize and mobilize its membership for imminent elections.
But how can the National Conference strategize about elections without knowing or determining who will be the party’s presidential and prime ministerial candidates for general elections. You have to develop a strategy around a leadership and unless the membership or delegates know who the prospective presidential and prime ministerial candidates are, it would be difficult for them to develop an effective strategy.
The AFC is however, saying that its National Conference will not elect its election candidates, since the party’s Constitution provides for a special conference for the identification of these candidates. This places the delegates to today’s National Conference in the dilemma of having to contemplate an election strategy without knowing who will lead the party into elections.
The AFC will no doubt use the National Conference to have its proposals for Constitutional reform discussed and approved. However, before the Alliance for Change addresses the supposed deficiencies of Guyana’s Constitution, it should examine the weaknesses of its party’s own Constitution, which quite amazingly allows for a Special Congress to elect the party’s presidential and prime ministerial candidates instead of the Conference of the party doing so.
If needs be, the AFC may wish to strengthen its democratic credentials by passing an amendment to its Constitution to allow for either today’s conference to elect the party’s candidates for general elections or allowing the total membership to do so at some other conference of the party.

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THE AFC NATIONAL CONFERENCE AND ELECTIONS

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