The AFC will become like the PNC and PPP if …

Oct 07, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

One day, angry at what I had written about him in one of my Stabroek News columns, the leader of the Democratic Labour Movement, Paul Tennassee, sought to physically attack me in the head office of the WPA. This was in 1991. He was there to participate in a meeting of the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy.
I know the political culture of the WPA very well and knew that its leadership would frown on that type of primitive behaviour.
I wrote the WPA leadership asking them to demand an explanation from Tennassee. They wrote him a pointed letter especially in the light that the offensive display took place in the WPA building.
If we are going to ask the PNC and PPP to remove the flaws in their political culture and the faults in the individual character of their leaders, we have to maintain our impeccability because we end up looking like fools and hypocrites in the eyes of our young population.
Newer parties like GAP, Benschop’s Independent Party, and most of all the AFC have to draw the line with its members and supporters when they display political crassness that not only borders on moral contempt for Guyanese history but smacks of the old political culture that has virtually destroyed the nation of Guyana.
I refer to a pro-AFC letter in the KN of September 4, captioned, “Where is the maturity among our so-called leaders?” The first moral sin committed by the New York-based writer was that he/she chose to be anonymous. An unnamed person hurls invectives at some fine Guyanese patriots, but fearfully takes refuge in anonymity.
I plan to address this abnormality in the letters columns of the two independent dailies by writing Messrs. Glenn Lall and Anand Persaud now that there is a media owners association in Guyana.
The second offensive dimension of the abusive missive is that it was passed on to the media by someone high up in the AFC who after reading the contents should have done extensive editing. I am disappointed at this person that I have known before he was born and I will tell him so.
Rupert Roopnaraine and Clive Thomas are treated contemptuously in the present context of Guyana’s evolving political life. Whatever ideological faults the two men have and whatever present political postures they have taken, these are citizens who courageously fought for the freedoms that we lost in the Burnham era and endured tremendous hardships for their patriotism.
Then came the moment of tempestuous rage in me when at the ending part of the letter, the unseen, unnamed, unheard writer observed that; Mrs. Sheila Holder has been fighting for our people for as long as I can remember.
The person who wrote those lines and in the same breath had the temerity to criticize the praxis of Roopnaraine and Thomas, is not eligible to be part of the AFC if the AFC says it is fighting for a new political culture.
This essay here is not a criticism of Ms. Holder but it is bordering on political narrow-mindedness of the worst kind to juxtapose the balance sheet of the struggle of Roopnaraine/Thomas and Holder.
Ms. Holder should not be held responsible for what this New York-based immigrant had to say. But every AFC leader should object to the tone of that letter.
I am not a WPA member, I was an AFC voter and may still vote for that party if all opposition groups agree to participate next year, but AFC people are expected to distance themselves very far from political deportment that resembles the values of the PNC and PPP.
Ramjattan and Trotman should pen their disapproval in the media when their immature supporters engage in conduct that is politically unbecoming. So much is expected of the AFC, and for that reason the AFC should at all times raise the banner of a new horizon with its new culture very high.
We all make mistakes. On a few occasions Ms. Holder has faulted very badly. That doesn’t mean we should question her anti-dictatorship clothes. In fact this writer believes Ms. Holder means well. But when inelegancies occur with increasing frequency then AFC leaders should be told where they are going wrong. Ms. Holder should not have voted for the PPP’s nominees in the Parliamentary Appointments Committee.
And she blundered badly in ridiculing the effort of this writer and MP Everall Franklin to get Bishop Edghill in his capacity as Chairman of the ERC to be accountable to the people of Guyana.

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