I hope Dr Persaud acknowledges his mistake: if it is a mistake at all

Jan 09, 2010 Letters

Dear Editor,
Dr Randy Persaud’s letter (Kaieteur News January 7, 2009) on “the revisionist hoax and other fallacies” of David Hinds and Freddie Kissoon is in keeping with his previous critique of the WPA.
However, I wish to correct what is either a mistake or a deliberate attempt to mislead readers.
According to Dr Persaud::
“The source of my contention is Dr. Hinds himself. The good gentleman from the WPA published an article in Social and Economic Studies, a refereed journal, in which he clearly stated that the preferred position of the WPA in 1992 was for the just-defeated Hoyte to become the President and that there should be no role for Dr. Jagan in the government. According to Hinds, the WPA thought that Jagan should be left out because he had been too divisive in Guyana’s history. If you do not believe me you can contact Hinds and ask him to send you the article in question.”
Dr Persaud actually collapses two separate parts of the article to which he refers (and two different scenarios) into one narrative to make his point. The first scenario occurred in 1990, well before the 1992 election. The WPA had proposed an interim caretaker government, led by Mr. Hoyte, to govern the country in the period between the end of the constitutional life of the then PNC government and the date of the new election. This is what I wrote in the article referenced by Dr. Persaud.
Four years later, in 1989, the WPA moved a successful motion in the National Assembly for a “national dialogue of all social forces…aimed at an internal solution of the elections issue and a full dialogue of the many sided crisis” (Kwayana 1999: 10).
The dialogue never got off the ground as the PNC insisted on taking elections off the agenda. With elections due in December 1990, the parties were working against time. Not all of the reforms had been put in place and the opposition parties were skeptical about holding the election without clear guarantees that it would be free and fair.
The WPA, in particular, favored postponing the poll until all the reforms were in place.
It proposed, both in parliament and in the PCD, an interim government for the period between the end of the PNC’s tenure and the holding of the election whereby the ruling party and the opposition would evenly share cabinet posts with the presidency going to the incumbent PNC. According to the WPA this “caretaker” government would be in office “for a limited duration with a commitment to the completion of the electoral reforms for genuine elections at the end of the agreed period, and a minimum economic programme” (Roopnarine 2002:2).
The second scenario referred to by Dr Persaud had to do with the disagreement between the WPA and the PPP over Dr Jagan’s candidacy as head of the PCD’s slate for the 1992 election. This is what I wrote.
Given the PPP’s stated commitment to a winner-does-not-take-all government and the WPA’s historic embrace of executive power sharing as a solution to the racial problems, negotiating a PCD pre-election and post-election arrangement seemed a foregone conclusion. However, there was one important stumbling block: leadership. When the issue of a consensus PCD presidential candidate arose, the PPP proposed its leader, Cheddi Jagan, but the WPA preferred a neutral candidate outside of the political parties. The WPA felt that given Jagan’s central role in the racial acrimony of the past, his candidacy would alienate African Guyanese voters. But the PPP, confident that it could attract the majority Indian vote, refused to budge; thus once again sacrificing racial unity for party superiority.
After intense and sometimes acrimonious negotiations, the PCD parties failed to arrive at an agreement and went their separate ways.
I hope Dr Persaud— as they used to say in Buxton when I was a boy—”have the proper decency” to acknowledge his mistake: if it is a mistake at all.
David Hinds

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