Dr Rodney and the WPA have to be remembered for many reasons

Jan 06, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Nigel Westmaas as well as David Hinds have responded to a “revisionist” account of the role of Dr Walter Rodney and the WPA in our recent political history.
They were referring to remarks made in a recent Annan Boodram letter. Boodram said the WPA and Rodney left no lasting legacy. That their politics was immature and its historical utility questionable. We do not agree.
Dr Rodney and the WPA have to be remembered for many reasons and we as a nation have to be forever grateful.
First, the party arose, and Rodney joined it, at a point in the early-mid seventies where the PNC government, consolidating its hold on the economy and its occupation of the administrative space, had begun to suffer the effects of a world wide crisis that would impoverish us all and accentuate the tensions in the country.
The PNC was under stress, had begun to distract itself with the futilities of the example of foreign demagogic socialisms, had grown hostile to criticism and was evidently adrift. It was clear that while the economic model the PNC favoured met, in principle, with little objection from the WPA or the PPP, the political alienation and disorientation at all levels of society had become marked. The WPA would attract and mobilise those elements in the population that shared a weakened or negative affinity with PPP or PNC. So the party offered hope.
Second, the WPA moved the national political discourse from the base of the by then entrenched racial suspicion and antagonism, to higher ground where the conflict was defined as being between imposition and consultation, inclusion and exclusion, efficiency and a contrived populism etc.
The WPA, like the AFC of today and the many individual politicians that have arisen always in our society, went beyond the reductionist definitions of our problems and offered fresh ways of looking at the situation.
It did so at a time when the PPP, no less theoretically concerned with surpassing the race problem than was the PNC, had  fallen into the trap of permitting the systemic problems of the government and the growing irrelevance of its economic model to be interpreted by many in its ranks in the old Indian versus Black antagonism.
The PPP even encouraged racial polarisation by itself interpreting PNC policy in racial terms. While the WPA was against discrimination it did not elevate it to the role of principal motive and sin of the PNC. (What the WPA had to say about PPP race consciousness needs examination because the PPP was also an ally at that time.) So the party offered an alternative discourse.
Third, the WPA removed the veil of invincibility with which a triumphant PNC had enveloped itself. Not only did the PNC party “win” elections at home, but it genuinely enjoyed enormous respect on the international stage. Its role in the non-aligned movement, in the struggle for the end of racist colonialism in Africa and elsewhere, its steadfastness against the ravages of what it saw as an insensitive international capitalism, enhanced the party’s image abroad.
The WPA, through the activism of its leaders and their own network of international “progressive” contacts, plus the respect Rodney commanded, would cause discomfort to the PNC on the international scene. The PNC found itself faced with an adversary no less notable on the world stage than it had itself succeeded in becoming. Rodney’s death would do great damage to the PNC´s image. So the party was effective and successful at this level.
Internally, WPA sabotage and the embarrassment it caused, giving vicarious satisfaction to so many anti-government people at the time, would effectively demonstrate that despite the militarisation of the society, the local intelligence gatherers and the influence or control of the judiciary, it was possible to shake the paramount party. The marches and public meetings, still possible in the PNC semi-democracy, re-dynamised the opposition forces and became foci for popular courage. So it lent force to an opposition movement that was not seen as very effective at the time.
Fourth, the WPA leadership, was composed of veteran politicians, of a generation of academics who had often sat on the same school benches as many in the leadership of the PNC and allied institutions, grassroots members, women who would add at some stage their sensitivity to the gender problems still unresolved, even members of race based organisations like ASCRIA and IPRA…the WPA brought new ideas and a new praxis to our politics. It showed that broad alliances based on principles could work. So it offered an alternative model of party organisation and a principle of political adherence that was fresh.
Why and where, then, did it lose impetus?
What was fatal to the WPA´s long term prospects, it appears to me, was its identification in the public eyes almost exclusively with the “anti-dictatorship” slogan. In short, while the WPA organised, in many ways it did not, like PNC or PPP have a major trade union base or the attachment to any racial group as its electoral base.
It means that once the anti-dictatorship struggle came to an end with the death of Mr Burnham and Mr Hoyte´s dismantling of much of his legacy, the WPA finds itself not only without a raison d´etre but also without a voter pool to which it had welded itself.
It would seem to me then that for many Guyanese once 1992 had arrived, the WPA was seen as having fulfilled its historical mission. The point is also, as Tacuma Ogunseye has pointed out, the WPA did not apparently seek to develop an electoral base at the start.
It simply had no intention of competing in what it saw as a useless exercise.
The  party nonetheless played  a significant role in helping define the post-1992 arrangements for the sharing of power. But by that time even Dr Jagan seems to have been persuaded that the WPA had fulfilled its historical objective. Perhaps he would have reacted differently had the party developed a voting bloc. But when the WPA elevated itself above the attachment to an ethnic voting block, it made a choice that would, noble as it seems, leave it adrift after 1992. The WPA would have been conscious of this weakness I am sure. But would have been unable to do anything about it. The WPA had also been ambivalent about including the PNC in any national joint government and seemed not to have favoured PNC involvement until certain conditions and the nature of the party had changed.
This meant that a different calculus came to the fore at the moment of the 1992 elections.
People voted as they historically had done once the deviation of the socialist PNC had been put out of the way and Hoyte had re-assured the traditional followers.
The WPA, I repeat,  remains as a model of political action free of racial partisanship, from which the AFC, a party similarly detached from pandering to any racial bloc would benefit. The dynamics of the last elections were different. Again, as in the Burnham era, there was dissatisfaction with their party by many PNC voters.
But while the concerns in the seventies were focused on the PNC deviance, the recent elections seem to have shifted the spotlight to PPP deviance and the confusion in strategy and tactic the PNC seemed to demonstrate.
The AFC arrived at a moment when it would benefit from this disaffection. When the WPA had been at its height, free elections may have given it the same dividend the AFC now enjoys. It never had the chance.
But, above all of that, the WPA´s lasting legacy is the example of all of those courageous people who lost lives, careers, time…to insist on a change from which many now benefit. The truth is that the PPP at the time, while active on many fronts and still organised, would not have been able, alone, to bring the internal and external pressure that led before the change in the cold war geo-politics, to the PNC having to humble itself. We cannot forget the WPA; neither can the PNC or the PPP.
The role or lasting influence of a movement cannot be measured only in the number of votes it commands or the seats it occupies. It may also be measured by the power of its example and the ideas it has left in the national consciousness. Much political writing and thought and activism on an international scale has had the effect of planting new ideas in a society. And often the electoral results are neither immediate nor measurable.
In this way, the WPA cannot be dismissed. The party, doubtless, has made its mistakes. In many ways the heterogeneity of its adherents would have been a source of weakness. As a protest movement it worked better than as a political party.
Interestingly, the WPA seems, these days to be concentrating on what many of its members see as the reigning injustice of the time – the lack of inclusive governance and the persistence of the mechanism of racial polarisation. This position now places it in opposition to certain tendencies in the PPP. The fight is now along different lines.
Abu Bakr

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