The PPP was a superior opposition party to any we have now in Guyana

Feb 25, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The PPP was in the opposition for 28 years and even when the WPA came and surpassed it in terms of superior skills and confrontational strategies, the PPP remained an effective political organization planning its methods carefully; a method of weakening the PNC Government.
It combined violent attacks with parliamentary antics and was more than willing to enter alliances even if it meant it would have been overshadowed as it did with Walter Rodney and the WPA.
I was the WPA’s representative in the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy (PCD) along with the great freedom fighter Tacuma Ogunseye and the late Joshua Ramsammy. The WPA smothered the PPP, with Rupert Roopnaraine providing the content of the PCD’s intellectual deliveries.
But PPP leaders were never deterred, because at the back of the mind of the collective leadership of Freedom House, they knew they were in the PCD as part of the requirements of a tactical alliance. PPP leaders may have lacked savoir vivre and savoir faire when they were in the opposition, but they made up for that through vicarious means – the WPA was the delivery boy. The planning and the cunning never ceased. In the end success came in 1992.
Today, what we have as opposition parties in this land is a stuck record of apathy that de-energizes the entire population.
The miasma, venalities, perversities, lies and fictions that are heaped upon the opposition parties would have never gone unattended by Freedom House when the PPP was in opposition.
Mrs. Jagan was the chief marshal. From her office in the Mirror head office at Industrial Site and on Robb Street, she sent out her troops to investigate, research and report.
It would have been impossible for Vishnu Bisram to pull off his amazing dramatic fictions if Mrs. Jagan was in the opposition. There is no way Bisram’s credibility would have survived for a year much less ten if Bisram was consistently reporting in his “polls” that Cheddi was lagging behind other opposition leaders. Right away, cadres would have been sent off to Berbice to investigate who was this gentleman.
PPP executive member, Dr. Paul Singh, Head of the Department of Political Science at UG would have been required to find out if Bisram made visits there.
For almost eight consecutive years, Vishnu Bisram reported that he conducted regular opinion polls, in accordance with Guyana’s demography through a New York-based institution named NACTA. In every survey, the results showed that PPP leaders were the favourite politicians, with Mr. Jagdeo way ahead of the pack, and the PPP would win any poll once it was held.
It was not that Mr. Bisram’s masquerades were given tiny space in the newspaper; they were assigned prominent coverage in both independent dailies. These “findings” were devastating to the opposition parties.
Yet no one in the PNC and AFC decided to Google NACTA and Bisram. No one in the PNC and AFC searched Berbice, Essequibo, UG, and Georgetown to find out if anyone met a guy named Vishnu Bisram.
There is absolutely no way Mrs. Jagan, as an opposition politician, would have allowed Bisram to get away with these murders.
It is the same with people like David Dabydeen and Randy Persaud. Once big names in academia were offering support to the PNC Government, Cheddi himself would have led an operation in the Diaspora to get protest movements going at the particular universities where these lecturers were based.
I saw this myself when I was a student in North America. At a place like Warwick University where Dabydeen is staffed and where there are countless Caribbean citizens, there has never been an anti-Dabydeen picket.
When the PPP was in the opposition, it did its work and did it handsomely. The PNC and AFC are just pale, poor emulators of the PPP.
Finally, the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC). There is widespread discussion on the constitutionality of the ERC. The feeling among many stakeholders, including all the opposition parties, is that the parliamentary mandate of the ERC has lapsed, and it needs to be recomposed by a two-thirds majority of the National Assembly.
Yet no opposition lawyer has taken time to test this matter in the courts, or at least ask a friendly attorney to try it. I say most inflexibly, the PPP, when in opposition, would have brought back Fenton Ramsahoye from Trinidad and had the ERC busy in the courts.
If the PNC and the AFC did try to emulate the PPP as an opposition party, they would have had power by now.

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The PPP was a superior opposition party to any we have now in Guyana

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