The bottom house monster

Jan 24, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I had lunch the other day with Clinton Urling, owner of German’s Restaurant and we disagreed on the strategies to change Guyana. Clinton feels that a few good people should stay within the two Leviathans and work inside their respective parties to transform them into a democratic structure.
This is not an uncommon method. It has worked in many countries, including the then USSR with Mikhail Gorbachev. But the USSR is not Guyana. Little known Guyana is quite a different country from so many others. The PNC and the PPP are not like your average political party.
I found it funny that Vincent Alexander should have contested the leadership of the PNC without the PNC first democratizing and secondly, changing its old political culture. I was not in the least surprised at the aftermath. One of the old tricks returned to the PNC during the leadership challenge—voters who aren’t voters.
I lived in Wortmanville/Werk-en-Rust all my life and I know the PNC office on D’Urban Street was always deserted. Then suddenly that group produced 800 members at the congress. Old habits did not return. Old habits were always there.
The PNC is the same party it was when it ruled Guyana from the sixties. The crucial mistake analysts make is that they attribute post-1985 changes to the PNC. It was the Hoyte presidency that pioneered the historic transformation. Hoyte virtually and physically sidelined the PNC.
A good example was his appointment of Dr. Tyrone Ferguson as Head of the Presidential Secretariat. What that meant was that this appointee was a Hoyte guy who didn’t come from within the ranks of the PNC. His enduring loyalty to Hoyte protected Hoyte from the tentacles of the PNC.
The PNC offers itself as a reformed party but it is hard to see that instinct in them. I have seen many top-level PNC leaders show one face to the Guyanese people since 1992, yet behaved the opposite way at UG.
The point is that whoever succeeds Mr. Corbin will not be an innovator unless he/she engineers a new political culture. The PNC leaders are hopelessly trapped in that old river from which they cannot swim out.
It is the same with the PPP. Look how Jagdeo turned out. What went wrong is not easy to ascertain. The connecting thread between the young generation of PPP leaders like Jagdeo, Robert Persaud, Frank Anthony, Priya Manickchand,and hundreds of others like them and the older stalwarts is the bottom house monster that has swallowed up all of them.
PPP leaders do not get their indoctrination from Parliament, party congresses, party symposia and other forums. They are trained in PPP culture through the bottom house meetings.
If there is a public lecture at Freedom House, the first, second and third tier leaders would hear beautiful, scintillating and inspirational concepts being delivered by the PPP stalwarts. Listeners would be told that the PPP stands for equality and liberty and the rights of all citizens must be preserved at all cost irrespective of race, culture and religion. But these symposia at Freedom House and at GAWU offices are inconsequential frivolities.
It is the bottom meeting on the sugar estates and at the homes of party and union leaders in the countryside that moulds the political character of all newcomers.
The young generation is told that Guyana is in a permanent battle of Africans versus Indians; that the PPP is a world class party that attracts the envy of many sections of the Guyanese society; that the opposition wants to put their own constituencies in power at the expense of PPP members; that the AFC, WPA, the GHRA, TUC never liked the PPP and are working together to bring down a PPP Government; that there are people in Guyana that will invent nasty rumours against the PPP and members must fight against that.
The bottom house monster is a serious guy. By the time he finishes with his conversion techniques the sixteen-year-old activist has the same stripes as the older leaders from the fifties and sixties.
If you attend one of these bottom house meeting during election campaigns, then you will see how hopelessly trapped are all PPP cadres. This is something Clinton Urling is not familiar with. If Guyana is going to have a future, it has to be in one of two ways – a national government of many stakeholders or the loss of power and influence by both Leviathans.
Whoever secures the presidential slot for the PPP and if through racial voting, the PPP wins in 2011, he/she, without exception, will run the country the exact way since 1992. The bottom house monster has chewed up Guyana.

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