HOW WILL THE PPP BE ACCOMMODATED IN AN APNU GOVERNMENT?

Jul 31, 2011 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The main opposition’s traditional position was that there would always be room for the PPP in a power-sharing government. Thus the PPP was always expected to be part of a government of national unity if the coalition of parties known as APNU wins.
That position is now uncertain in light of ambiguous declarations in recent days. First, there was the declaration that PPP members tainted with corruption would not be allowed to form part of the government.
Then last Friday there was an open invitation to members of the PPP who are not tainted with corruption to get on board APNU. Rather than dealing with the PPP, what we now have is a situation where APNU may be dealing with selected individuals within the PPP.
APNU does appear now to be suggesting that the coalition may be willing to consider individuals from within the PPP as members of a government of national unity, but not the party per se. This needs clarification, as does the WPA’s stance on the issue of shared governance within a government of national unity.
When the PPP won the elections of 1992, the then President Cheddi Jagan was interested in having Professor Clive Thomas as his minister of Planning and Development. The WPA’s position was that the PPP should not be dealing with individual members of the WPA. That is, the WPA would not condone the PPP picking select persons to serve in the government. It took a position that the PPP had to negotiate with the party and not with individuals.
By that time, the PPP decided to abort the process and go with what it had, leaving the WPA out in the cold licking its wounds.
A WPA member of APNU’s coalition is now saying that the party welcomes untainted individuals from the PPP to be part of the coalition’s team and to be part of a government of national unity. It means that APNU is adopting the very position as regards the PPP, as the PPP was accused of doing with the WPA.
The PNCR had made it clear since 2006 that the PPP would be part of any government that it formed. And given the electoral strength of the PPP, any such involvement would have had to be substantive if representation in a power-sharing government had some relationship to the individual parties’ shares of the total votes cast in the elections.
The PNCR insisted that it was committed to executive power-sharing and believed that Guyana would only have power-sharing if the PNCR won those elections. It did not win the elections but the PNCR has always said, without specifics, that the PPP would be part of a power-sharing government.
The pendulum now seems to be swinging in the direction of a government of individuals rather than of parties. APNU now also seems to be more about individuals rather than parties.
Thus there is a need to clarify whether the proposed national unity government will be based on any specific formula referencing positions within the government to the share of the overall votes received by individual parties in the elections. Or will the composition of the government of national unity be decided from pulling names from a hat?
APNU needs to clarify whether when it comes to the PPP’s role in a national unity government if it will bypass the party and simply decide who from the PPP should be represented within the government of national unity.
The WPA ought to be sensible enough to know that this latter approach will never be seen by the people of Guyana as being representative. Once the winning government decides to select individuals from other parties without the sanction of their parties, those individuals will be treated as defectors, and they will not be seen as representing the party or its constituents.
The history of Guyana has been as such that persons formerly of the PNCR who have gone to the PPP are never seen by their former constituents as representing them. The same goes for persons from the PPP who have jumped into bed within the PNCR. They are seen as making their own personal choices.
So is the PPP which has a commanding political presence going to have a role within a government of national unity? Or will be it that as elections get closer, the WPA will do as it did in relation to its original national government unity proposal when the PNCR was in office? Then, the WPA made it irrefutably clear that there was no role for the PNCR in a government of national unity. Is it repeating history with a slight twist, saying that it is willing to accept PPP persons on its coalition and within a government of national unity, but not the PPP per se?

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HOW WILL THE PPP BE ACCOMMODATED IN AN APNU GOVERNMENT?

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