THE END OF POLITICAL COOPERATION

May 04, 2009 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

No one should delude themselves into believing that when the Alliance for Change made representations to the President of Guyana, concerning the Summit of the Americas, they were seeking a plane trip for their leaders.

Those who feel this way are only fooling themselves, and in the process missing the most important reason for the proposal. The AFC leadership was not interested merely in going on a plane trip to Trinidad.

Rather, this columnist suspects that what the Alliance for Change was attempting was to wedge open an opening that would facilitate greater political cooperation at a time of a global crisis which makes such cooperation all the more necessary.

The ruling PPP administration has given only lip service to political cooperation.

They have failed to sustain any engagement with the opposition when it came to domestic politics. But if the government and the opposition could not cooperate on issues of domestic politics, there was no reason why such cooperation should not be pursued when it came to foreign policy.

Surely, if the government was gobbling up all the domestic political space, the opposition could be justified in testing the government’s sincerity about political cooperation by seeking a rapprochement on a specific issue of foreign policy; Guyana’s position on the Summit of the Americas.

The government may have genuinely misread this approach by the Alliance for Change. But I doubt it. Instead of seeing this approach as an opportunity to have a meeting of minds with the Alliance for Change, this approach was rebuffed with the President offering feeble excuses for not having the AFC represented on his team.

The issue of accreditation was mentioned. This is however a non-issue. Certainly in summits of this sort persons are always being added and dropped from official delegations at the last minute and there can be no reason why thee could not have been late minute accreditation to widen the Guyana team.

However, even if the AFC could not be accredited for the Conference it could have still been part of the official Guyana delegation.

That act alone, of the President taking along the leader of the Alliance for Change, would have had a value beyond its mere symbolism. It would have signaled to the Guyanese people that the government was serious about political cooperation and was willing to give, even at the symbolic level, credence inclusiveness.

But that was too much to ask of the ruling administration which has now proven beyond any shadow of doubt that it intends to monopolize all political space in Guyana.

It could not find a basis for including the AFC in Guyana representation and it could not accommodate a recent PNCR motion calling for greater use of communal service in criminal sentencing.

The Alliance for Change was within its right having being rebuffed in running advertisements in the media in Trinidad critical of the governance of the government of Guyana. There is nothing unusual or anti-nationalist about this.

The PPP did it all the time during the twenty eight years that the PNC was ruling Guyana. It supporters overseas wasted no opportunity to highlight the atrocities that were taking place in Guyana. It was part of the PPP’s campaign of struggling on all fronts.

Where the Alliance for Change can be condemned is for internationalizing its opposition to the PPP administration without any militant action in Guyana itself. T

he Alliance for Change is not doing enough at home to expose the PPP and this is one of the reasons why some persons may have felt that the AFC ought not to have placed those advertisements which made their country look bad. Had the AFC been militant in Guyana and was doing more than simply holding press conferences and running advertisements in the newspapers, then the resort to internationalizing their campaign would have found greater support.

At least if the new campaign tactic of the AFC is to make use of advertisements, at least it should have attempted to place the ads that were placed in this newspaper and in the Stabroek News, in the Guyana Chronicle.

It would have been interesting to see whether the Guyana Chronicle would have carried the ad. If the Guyana Chronicle had refused to do so, then the AFC could have claimed that freedom of expression was being hampered and thus adduce another specific ground for protesting poor governance in Guyana.

The situation should not be crystal clear to the opposition in Guyana. The government is not interested in political cooperation with the opposition. The opposition should therefore refuse to become involved in any consultations which the government will hold in the name of such cooperation.