Mr. Rahman’s analysis is wide of the mark

Sep 10, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Permit me to reply to Mr. Jinnah Rahman‘s letter, “The most vicious writers are the ghost bloggers”, which was published in Kaieteur News on Thursday, September 2, 2010.
In his letter Mr. Rahman was critical of the WPA for working with the PNCR, under the leadership of Mr. Robert Corbin. He also claimed in relation to this issue that he had raised his concern with the party and has not received either an explanation or justification for the position that party has assumed. His other point of importance is that the WPA has refused to do serious work among the people and the AFC has now taken over the role played by the WPA in the past.
It is important that I begin by making the point that Mr. Rahman is one of the many PPP members/supporters who joined the WPA during the period of the civil rebellion when the party and Walter Rodney were locked in struggle to remove the dictatorial Burnham regime. Because of his active role in the struggle Rahman and a number of other comrades were charged by the police for treason in 1980.
WPA was instrumental in him escaping the police dragnet and he was sent abroad. Subsequently Mr. Rahman lived in Britain for a number of years and resumed his residence in Guyana about two years ago.
Since his return to Guyana he has once again become a political activist in his personal right and not as a member of the WPA. In fact, since he has been back he is known to have said publicly and privately that he is not a member of the WPA. However and in spite of his declared non WPA status he has had unrestrained access to the party’s leadership, something he has always enjoyed even while he was aboard.
More importantly, he has been a guest at his request on several segments of Walter Rodney Groundings, a WPA sponsored TV programme which is aired on HBTV Channel 9 on Sundays at 5.30pm.
I give this brief history for two reasons. First, I want to give recognition to Mr. Rahman’s role as a patriot and an anti-dictatorial fighter. I believe this qualifies him to be a critic on both national issues and the WPA’s role in Guyana’s political landscape. I therefore respect his right to offer objective criticisms whenever he sees the need to do so.
Secondly, I also believe that as a comrade in struggle and a former party member he has a moral and political duty to be credible in his public polemics. In this context I want to say that his claim to have raised his concerns about WPA’s relationship with the PNCR is nothing but a figment of his imagination.
I have been a member of the WPA’s Executive from the birth of the party to the present. I am not aware of any occasion during that long period that Mr. Rahman requested an explanation or justification from the WPA party leadership on its decision to work with the PNCR on matters of importance to citizens of Guyana.
In spite of what he says he has never made such a request to the party’s leadership either when he was living aboard or, since his return to Guyana. I challenge him to prove otherwise. This comrade is no ordinary political activist. He is well informed and is aware that the party has on numerous occasions over the years explained its position on this matter. The most recent was on August 11, 2010 at the Party’s Centre, Rodney House, during a public discussion on the political situation in Guyana, which was held under the theme “After the AFC’s decision – What next?”
While it is true that Rahman was abroad at the time of the discussion he read the reports on it and he commented from abroad on the results.
Any keen observer of politics in Guyana will not miss the obvious, i.e. the WPA/PNCR relations are more often raised by PPP/C leaders, members, supporters and Indian rights activists, who question this relationship in the context of Walter Rodney assassination, and not in the context of what the political situation in the country require. And they have kept on doing so 30 years after Rodney’s assassination.
It is clear that for them, 18 years after 1992, that nothing has changed – the PNCR is still in power and the process of political struggle to remove them from the political landscape is ongoing. Up to this point I am being very generous to these critics, even though their motivation is obviously political wickedness with the intention to divide and rule. They are promoting the politics of hate. Their preference is to have the WPA and PNCR perpetually battling each other instead of being part of an organised, collective response to the excesses of the PPP/C Government.
Equally important to their agenda are the racist considerations that are present in their accusations against the WPA. They have worked out that if they are able to keep Indians away from the WPA they will remain loyal to the PPP/C – thereby keeping the PPP/C’s house united. For the moment I will give Mr. Rahman the benefit of the doubt and not place him among this group.
The WPA’s position on working with the PNCR was enunciated while the late President, Desmond Hoyte, was in office and he had publicly committed his party and government to political, economic and social reforms. At that time the political opposition and the people were fighting for the return of democracy and free and fair elections. WPA was a member of the then opposition political grouping, the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy (PCD).
In a document which was issued in its name, WPA had publicly announced the conditions for talking to the PNCR. We had made it very clear that if the PNCR consented to free and fear elections including the counting of the ballots at the place of poll, and it respected the will of the electorate, we were prepared to treat that party as having turned a new page and were prepared to work with it to advance the democratic process in the country.
In political terms the WPA at the time was pointing the PNC’s leadership and the progressive forces in that party in the direction of a patriotic disengagement from dictatorial rule and onto a
path that was intended to return Guyana to democratic rule.
I believe that our position had a positive influence on Hoyte’s and the PNC politics. It undoubtedly assisted in ushering in free and fair elections and a return to democracy in Guyana. Readers will note that WPA’s efforts were public knowledge. None of this was done clandestinely.
What I find ridiculous in all of this is even as the Rahmans of this world and the other detractors of the WPA seek to malign it for talking to the PNCR, they have conveniently forgotten that it was the PPP led by the Jagans, which was discussing with the man they referred to as the “Devil Incarnate” – Burnham – outside of the knowledge of the WPA and the PCD to which it was closely aligned, a power sharing solution to the country’s problems that would have brought the PPP into the corridors of political power.
It is important to note that neither of the Jagans nor any other PPP leader had publicly criticised the WPA at the time we had announced our new position on the PNCR. And I repeat that the WPA position on talking with the PNCR was conditioned on the PNCR meeting a set of criteria which WPA had taken the time to outline in clear, unambiguous language.
In the opinion of the WPA the PNC by its actions, had met the WPA conditions hence our decision to talk with that party.
The PPP was deliberately silent on this development simply because its leaders knew they would have been the primary beneficiaries of a change in the PNC’s position on free and fair elections. The PPP’s attacks only came years after it was returned to office in 1992. As I have said previously Comrade Rahman had never, ever during his long stay overseas publicly questioned the party’s position, neither did he write to the Executive expressing his opposition to it and I am forced to wonder at his deliberate misrepresenting of this information to the public.
If the truth be known, all of the political and social forces in the country at that time were united in the view that democracy was returned in Guyana in 1992 and the country was presumably, set on a new path. Parliamentary democracy was at that time perceived as the way forward and it was only as a result of the PPP/C’s rape of the Constitution and its known violations of The Rule of Law that collaboration between the PNCR and the WPA on a number of national issues began.
The record will show that the collaboration between these two parties commenced in Parliament after 1992 when both parties were members of that body and were part of the Parliamentary Opposition Parties. WPA’s constitutional obligation was to work with all parties in the parliament including the ruling party. However, the PPP/C’s behaviour in government made it difficult for the WPA to have a serious relationship with the ruling party and its regime. So as part of the opposition in parliament we worked for opposition unity whenever possible in defence of the people and the nation’s interest.
We continue to do so now we are out of the parliament.
It is clear that Mr. Rahman’s sense of democratic politics excludes the PNCR. He is hostile to opposition parties working together with the PNCR even if it is for the good of the country. People like Mr. Rahman who argue that the WPA should not work with a Corbin led PNCR, have little or no respect for the democratic process.
What they really want to do is to exclude the main opposition party from the process and deny its importance in the political equation. This point becomes very clear when it is realised that the first argument against a relationship with the PNCR had to do with Corbin’s unsuitability for the Presidency. Corbin then ‘bus up’ everybody’s bag and declared that he had no interest in the position either inside or outside of the party, and the next stumbling block became his unsuitability to lead the PNCR. If this demand is ever met there will be another and another until the elections have come and gone and the PPP will remain very happy that they have succeeded in keeping the opposition political parties disunited. Those who continue to spew their bile against the PNCR seem not to care that in proceeding with their line of argument what they are really doing is demanding the marginalisation of Africans and contributing to the PPP/C’s domination of the country with all of its racial implications.
Another contention of Mr. Rahman is that the WPA refused to do the hard work it did in the past among the people i.e. consistent work in the communities.
He is aware that the WPA’s inability to do as it did in the old days is directly related to the political racial polarization beginning with the 1992 general elections and continuing with subsequent elections.
These developments have wiped out multi-racial politics since there is no multi-racial constituency to support a party like the WPA. The resources including financial, which we relied on are a thing of the past and this is also true for the Diaspora. Rahman is fully aware, because we have discussed this with him, that there are people in Guyana today who promise WPA financial assistance, who very quickly withdraw it for spurious reasons.
Yet we are expected to do the impossible. It seems that we are expected to do what parties and organisations who are better endowed with resources are finding it difficult in most communities to accomplish and even fearful of attempting to do. But even with the very limited resources at its disposal and the withdrawal of promised financial assistance, WPA has been very effective in terms of its agenda. This point is underscored when one examines the President’s and his government’s responses to the WPA, a party that so many of our detractors have declared to be dead.
The bile which Jagdeo and others spew in the direction of the party are indicators of our effectiveness.
My assessment of Rahman’s politics is that he is rooted in the past. He sees himself as a political theoretician, but I am yet to see any serious analysis from him on the political situation in the country. I will be delighted to hear his theoretical justification for saying that the WPA should be equally hard on the PNCR as we are on the PPP/C.
I am not certain how well he has grasped the political reality in the country and how good an analyst he is. In support of my contention I wish to point out that he lives in the countryside and work closely with the rice farmers. Last year on national television he predicted that there would be a collapse of the rice industry and country-wide starvation due to food shortage would have resulted. This did not materialise. He is yet to explain why his analysis of the situation was so wide of the mark.
I have no doubt that comrade Rahman would not have put his political repetition on the line, if he was not convinced of the correctness of his judgment. He was however proven to be wrong since the objective conditions did not correspond to his subjective thinking.
While the WPA is still committed to multi-racial unity of the working people, we have to take cognizance of the fact that the working class/working people in their politics has chosen to postpone the workers revolution for a later date. To be insensitive to this reality is to knock one’s head against a brick wall.  Every  political action or position taken by the WPA from 1992 to the present  have been influence by our desire to change the negative political environment,  to free up the working people and their organisations so that they can improve their material, political and spiritual well being, and not for any narrow party interest.
If we make mistakes and we do sometimes, it is due either to a misreading of the situation or to a lack of adequate information and not for selfish reasons.
As I await Comrade Jinnah Rahman’s explanation I must say that I am disappointed that an experienced political activist like him has difficulty understanding the correctness of the WPA’s actions at this juncture in light of the PPP/C’s bad governance. He complained in his letter that the WPA is putting greater pressure on the PPP/C than on the PNCR.
Is this great political thinker and strategist saying that we should hold the parties of the political opposition to a higher standard than we should the party which is in government? He seems not to understand that it is the PPP/C that forms the government and it is their behaviour, against which some of the most serious allegations have been made.
That is what places them under the microscope and is what is of great concern to citizens and the political opposition including the WPA. We offer no apology for adopting the position we have taken.
If I did not know Rahman personally I would have seen his hostility to the WPA working with the PNCR in racial terms since it is common for Indian Guyanese political activists to do so. They often forget that they have a moral responsibility to use their political skills to contribute to meaningful political changes in the politics of the nation and the structure of governance in the country.
Rahman’s politics at the moment seems to have more to do with his desire to embrace the AFC and their electoral adventurism than to deal with the interest of the working people.
Tacuma Ogunseye

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