THE PPP IS IN A TANGLE

Jun 27, 2009 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

While every member of the People’s Progressive Party has a right to respond to criticisms of the party, its history and its leadership – both present and past – not every response can be said to represent the official position of the party. This much must be made clear.
The party of course cannot, as a matter of policy, respond to everyone who makes a point against it. But surely the party must be interested in ensuring that the responses of its leaders in their private capacities do not cause the party to lose face.
There is a great deal of political revisionism taking place, and which is being allowed to take place, because of the party habit of at times ignoring certain comments that have been made in the press.
For example, just after the death of Mrs. Janet Jagan, there was a certain feature on her life published in another newspaper. This feature contained a number of interpretations and representation of facts which ought to have been challenged.
There was however no attempt by the party to officially respond to these allegations and thus this highly obnoxious publication has been left for the public record.
There are also a great many persons from overseas who are writing about Guyana’s history and making all manner of false claims which, if left unanswered, will also become the public record.
The party obviously is also in a state of transition having lost a number of its older members who had the historical memory to deal with these criticisms. And therefore what is happening now is that when certain criticisms are coming the party’s way, there is some difficulty in addressing these criticisms effectively, since in many instances, the person answering the criticisms may not have been part of the process which is being criticised and thus is constrained in his or her response. A few days ago, Tacuma Ogunseye, took a leader of the PPP to task over some claims that were made in respect to the negotiations within the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy.
He pointed out quite correctly that the person making the claims was not part of the negotiations that took place. There was a gracious response to Ogunseye’s letter by the PPP leader concerned, and this is something to be respected.
Except that I think the damage had already been done. As if to rub the salt in the wound, Mr. Eusi Kwayana, has jumped on the bandwagon and has totally devastated whatever defence could have been made of the issue in question.
I doubt whether there is anyone within the PPP at this time who would risk attempting to respond to Kwayana’s letter published in the Stabroek News yesterday.
The PPP however has to see beyond the issue of who proposed Kwayana for Chairman of the party and what the principal reasons were why he broke off with the PPP.
The PPP has a much more fundamental problem as it relates to education and propaganda. The party needs to appreciate that it is in the midst of a whirlwind of political revisionism and therefore it cannot allow any and every leader to respond to the revisionists’ claims.
The party has to appreciate that it can seriously embarrass itself unless it is equipped with the correct facts and interpretations of those facts, confront its critics in reasoned arguments.
This is why the party needs to aggressively address its educational and propaganda arms and to assign to these bodies, persons who are willing to engage in an in-depth study of the issues involved and to respond to its critics when there is a basis for such response.
What started as a simple issue as to whether the PPP should apologize has now turned into a serious re-examination of the internal mechanics that led to the breakdown of the PCD’s quest for a consensus candidate and now a dissection of the so-called ultra-left split in the PPP which took place after the 1955 split in the party.
There is a great deal of mischief of misrepresentation which is taking place and the party must develop the capacity to deal with these criticisms since some of the criticisms are taking nasty angle.
For example, it is now being alleged that something that Cheddi said was a mockery of Rodney. This is far from the truth, but the PPP needs to know how to deal with these criticisms and the first step in this process is to insist that an assigned person, have the responsibility of responding even where it concerns a direct criticism of something a leader of the party may have written and even if that leader is capable of replying.