Nestor’s fear of the AFC has prompted incoherent ramblings

Feb 03, 2011 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
I am somewhat skeptical of responding to Lurlene Nestor’s dabbler excursions into a disturbing realm of puerility and illogic as contained in her last letter captioned, “A hunch does not amount to a statement of fact”, dated the 29th January, 2011, published in Kaieteur News.
I do not know what to make of her inattentiveness. Moreover, if she was my student, I would have no alternative but to give her a C for the invaluable skill of coherence.
Nestor appears to be obsessed with Mr. Ramjattan’s speech at Bath even though I went to great length to explain and demystify the connotations and denotations of everything he said at Bath. To succinctly summarize, I reiterate, Mr. Ramjattan called for the expunging of all aspects and levels of fear among all segments of the Guyanese population.
He further posited that this expunging will mould a new political culture wherein the electorate would premise their voting on “reason and not race”. This new political culture would supplant an antiquated dispensation of politics maintained by the old political leviathans.
I wish to make the point at this juncture that the late David De Caries and Miles Fitzpatrick many years ago had done a paper entitled Twenty years of politics in our land. They forwarded the view that the political bifurcation of the PPP which was victorious under the Waddington Constitution and which had germinated from the initial PAC effectively disabled Guyana’s political system from subsuming ethnic insecurities cultivated in a colonial Guyana, which a victorious PPP of the 1953 elections had done to an extent.
Instead, it accentuated, reinforced and maintained a political and sociological ethnic divide. This paper would be on the course outline of my education of Lurlene Nestor on Guyana’s political history of she would agree with humble submission.
Moreover, this is where I find Nestor’s own particular political fear comes in. African Guyanese prior to the last election have had to live with a sort of fear that there was no other viable political entity representative of their identity and interest.
With the incorporation and growth of the AFC, the PNCR has become a historical artifact. I here state my categorical and unequivocal conviction that the AFC’s leader Raphael Trotman is a brighter fellow than all of the PNCR’s presidential hopefuls combined.
The veracity and validity of this assessment is contained and enshrined in the sustained diminution of electoral support the PNCR has experienced. In a word, it is my view that Nestor’s fear of the AFC has prompted and activated these incoherent ramblings.
At the AFC’s party launch on the 29th of January, wherein the Action Plan was unveiled, Guyanese of all descent and background assembled to partake in a discussion of change for Guyana. The launch which was seen throughout the world via live web cast, represented a new movement and vision which vitiates the necessity of the PPP and the PNC.
I want to emphasise here though, that it is the economic strategy of the AFC, crafted in consultation with Dr. Tarron Khemraj, who in my opinion is one the most brilliant economists Guyana has ever produced, which positions the AFC leaps and bounds above the rest.
According to this economic programme, the AFC will lower the value added tax from 16% to 12%. At the launch, financial advisor Sasenarine Singh contrasted this position with recent harebrained comments on this issue by the Prime Minster in the Parliament.
Some time ago, I recall that renowned accountant Christopher Ram saying in one of his weekly columns that he was willing to throw his support behind a political party that is willing to accentuate the injustice that is the VAT.
Mr. Editor, in Plato’s classic book The Republic, the fifth chapter deals with Justice in State and Individual. It is here posited that the State must possess four cardinal virtues or qualities namely: wisdom, courage, discipline and justice. It is my unreserved conviction that the Alliance for Change best encapsulates those four cardinal principles as enunciated by perhaps the father of western philosophy.
Somewhere in Nestor’s letter, I read words like perceptions and suspicions. I should note here that I have a very hard time reading missives of such poverty of substance and style. However, the AFC blueprint introduces the revolutionary notion of an ethnic impact audit. It is a revolutionary concept that is intended to investigate and allay real or perceived marginalisation.
The PNCR has always cussed out at the PPP for neglecting Buxton – Friendship and favouring Annandale and Lusignan, but has not had the testicular fortitude to forward a constructive mechanism to deal with real or perceived marginalisation save or except the depressed communities initiative that was raised by the late Mr. Hoyte.
The AFC has recognised that the more divided and polarized the society is the more critical will be the evaluation of the government’s policies. While there is an acknowledgment that the cause (and solution) of our ethnic problem goes beyond governmental actions, the fact of the matter is that we have to begin there. It is a simple matter of justice. No matter which party forms the Government, we accept that governmental actions have to be conducted on behalf of all the people: the State is our joint venture
The economic, political and social stultification that has been inflicted upon the Guyanese society by the PPP and PNC has rendered both of those institutions null and void.
The PNC, while in office carefully crafted an authoritarian State undergirded by a principle of party paramouncy and sustained by a series of fraudulent elections which isolated a whole segment of Guyana ethnic divide, thus, I say frankly to Nurlene Nestor of the PNCR that you have not the political imprimatur to say anything on ethnic inclusivity and harmony in Guyana.
Even before the crafting of this authoritarian State, I wish to emphasise, as Professor Raymond Smith had pointed out way back in 1961 in his book British Guiana, “There has been much talk about British Guiana becoming a plural society and it is not unlikely that someone will make a serious bid to get a system of proportional representation on the basis of race written in the final constitution. It is hoped that such a bid…. would be unsuccessful, for it would be a seriously retrograde step from which the country might never recover”.
Amar Panday BA

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