Contextualizing mo fyaah/slo fyaah

Apr 14, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Mrs. Sheila Holder of the Alliance For Change (AFC) in a letter to the press last Sunday, titled “Taking to the streets is not the answer,” has not fully come to grips with the nature of PPP/ Jagdeo rule in this country.
My fervent hope is that her assessment does not hurt the AFC. It was an honest analysis by Mrs. Holder, but unfortunately it contains serious and depressing misjudgements.
What Mrs. Holder means by “taking to the streets” is further outlined when she intoned that the street protests backfired on the PNC because they were infiltrated by agent provocateurs and worsened the ethnic fragility of the country.
Based on the experience that came out of mo fyaah/slo fyaah, Mrs. Holder concluded that the AFC had adopted a policy of street avoidance. She implores people not to see street protest as the only source of political activism against the PPP Government.
Desmond Hoyte had no idea that the PPP would have sent agent provocateurs to create anti-Indian violence when he embarked on a regime of street demonstration in the heart of the capital, mainly the commercial districts.
It happened and media reports of Indian victims caused widespread resentment by Indians against the PNC and African-Guyanese. Mrs. Holder was right in that respect. But looking back at mo fyaah/slo fyaah eight years after, within the context of the emergence of fascist features in the elected dictatorship that is the PPP Government/Jagdeo presidency from 2006 onwards, mo fyaah/slo fyaah was a huge success for the opposition.
To understand the political capital that accrued to the PNC under mo fyaah/slo fyaah, one must comprehend what the PNC’s objectives were. Hoyte was not concerned with electoral politics anymore. For him, the task of the PNC was to stop the PPP from complete control which PNC leaders believed had as one of its aims, the diminution of PNC constituencies. Read that to mean African-Guyanese.
Hoyte’s strategy was that he wasn’t going to adopt orthodox methods to confront the PPP because it would not be efficacious.
Hoyte wanted an ambience of tempestuous episodes which would force the PPP to the bargaining table. And it did. Mrs. Holder conceded this when in that very letter she wrote that the language of terror is the only one the PPP understands.
Had mo fyaah/slo fyaah been rekindled under the PNC, it is doubtful that the features of fascism as we see today in the Government of Guyana would have emerged. The tempest would have scared the PPP. It would have become uncertain of its government’s future and it would have offered concessions that would have tempered the energy of the PNC. Mrs. Holder has to know that the fascist features in the exercise of power today is related to a silent opposition
Mrs. Holder has to ask herself what has become of civilized governance in this country since mo fyaah/slo fyaah was extinguished.
Even Mrs. Holder’s own party, the AFC, has felt the brunt of elected dictatorship. Today in Guyana, the Government has gone into eerie, bizarre, medieval, diabolical directions that no other Caribbean Government has traveled since the colonials granted self-government.
But let us concede for the sake of argument that the AFC was wise not to mount street protests. Mrs. Holder seems to have one definition of what street protest means. In other words, street protest has only one shape – the type we call mo fyaah/slo fyaah.
Mrs. Holder cannot claim that this avenue was demanded of her party by its supporters and the Guyanese people. What people expected of the AFC is protest and demonstration. They didn’t have to take the form of rushing into commercial outlets and forcibly closing them. Protest and demonstration do not have to be confrontational.
It would not be insulting to say the AFC has never been involved in protest and demonstration since its birth. This has to be the only situation in the world where leaders of the opposition do not hold placards.
One hopes that Mrs. Holder is reading about the Republican Party’s rejection of President Obama’s health care bill. Republican law-makers are not closing down businesses but they are holding placards and protesting against Mr. Obama.
It is time someone instructs the AFC leadership how to hold a placard. Actually there is no art in it. It is funny that Mrs. Holder should say that the AFC is on the move with its latest action being the distribution of kites. That was nice. But there are AFC members and supporters who are not interested in receiving a kite. They want to see the AFC leadership share out something else — placards

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