The PNC is a failed and incompetent political organization

Jul 26, 2012 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Sometimes I wonder if that mass murdering charlatan, Jim Jones, is still operating in Guyana when I read the utterly illogical asininities that come from the mouths of political barkers in the public press. I wonder if Kool-Aid drinking is still en vogue.
Lurlene Nestor’s assault on truth and celebration of myopia titled “The PNCR remains the most progressive political party in current day Guyana” (KN, July 24, 2012) is the retch-inducing kind of journalism that if left unchecked could do serious damage to the intellectually and morally damaged who happen to believe this absurdity.
The PNCR is the laziest and most incompetent political party in the history of the region. It is an intellectual wasteland, devoid of thinking that could arrest its constant electoral beatings election after election. I do not often agree with Freddie Kissoon, but his view on the unmitigated indolence of the PNCR since the election in failing to use the courts coincides with mine.
Even before the results of the elections, the PNCR has been masquerading around this country only during elections when it goes begging and pleading with Africans for their votes, only to turn their backs on Africans when its leadership gets their seat in Parliament and the gold-plated concessions and benefits with it.
The PNCR has kicked, manhandled, backstabbed, abused and discarded the constituency that butters its political bread, Africans, since 1992. Its leadership has made some downright dumb decisions. It has shown no inclination to change its political stratagem when the hard, cold facts and brutal reality of ethno-politics and demographics kick it in the face.
The PNCR has stood as a silent bystander while the PPP has stolen, corrupted and redistributed hundreds of billions of Guyanese taxes in the past 20 years into the pockets of the plutocracy it feeds. Not one single court challenge has been brought by the PNCR to fight the PPP’s venalities. Even when Guyana got an opening of potential judicial light with the CCJ, the lackadaisical PNCR has not made one single challenge of national importance for the people of this country.
It is now close to eight months since the November 28, 2011 election and the PNCR has brought one measly piece of legislation to Parliament and, a law dealing with the Clerk of the National Assembly to boot, not legislation on corruption or NICIL or thievery or inequality or injustice.
The PNCR has been missing in action since the election. It backstabbed the AFC to get into bed with the PPP during the budget negotiations to double-cross Lindeners on the electricity issue before backpedalling when it was found out. It was as silent as a doorpost when the Chronicle’s racist editorial landed upon this nation on July 3, 2012, arguing it was going to let others decry the editorialized racism while it stayed out. Imagine this ‘progressive’ political party shutting up when its bread-and-butter constituency, Africans, were vilified, tarred and feathered.
Lurlene Nestor has some outlandish gumption to come here and talk about the PNCR as a progressive political organization. An organization that is recycling for leadership political dinosaurs associated with the most fascist and horrendous period of our nation’s history, a 28-year dictatorship that still cripples this country.
How could this organization be progressive? Is Nestor telling us that in this country of brilliant African minds, the PNCR could not find a young, progressive African professional who has no linkage to the nasty past of the party ahead of these men who will never lift the PNCR beyond the African vote, which is never enough to win an election?
Before Nestor puts the PNCR up on a pedestal where it has no place standing, she must realize that the PNCR is always going to be a perpetual second, once racial voting holds in Guyana, because the PNCR has done absolutely nothing to win votes from any group but Africans. The vital crossover ethnic groups, Amerindians and Mixed, rebuff the PNCR. The numbers are stacked against the party.
Stop this balderdash about a government of national unity. Incompetents sharing power is not the horizon the people of Guyana crave. Unless the PNCR and PPP and AFC are radically reformed to become more democratic organizations that encourage better leadership to challenge and displace the power-drunk and corrupt within their ranks, this government of national unity will be an opportunity for the governmental banditry to explode while they hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
A government of national unity is an attempt to obtain power through the back door by a group of politicians and parties that can no longer secure it through the electoral and democratic front door. Guyanese must reject it, for now with the PPP knowing its future is now minority government for quite some time and the PNCR knowing it cannot win a free and fair election ever in this country’s history, the national unity government drumbeats are beginning to sound louder. Forbes Burnham was never interested in national unity, only his own selfish power which impoverished Guyanese. Where was the PNC with this government of national unity concept all these 20 years?
Shared governance with this crop of PPP and PNC corrupters, rogues, misfits and incompetents will be a disaster in Guyana. It will lead to one-party state. When that happens the entire country will suffer. Who gave two ethnic parties representing two-thirds of the nation’s population the right to hog shared governance? Shared governance cannot work when it is done by ethnic parties catering to their constituencies, because those sizeable ethnic groups without political representation like Amerindians and Mixed will be at the mercy of other ethnicities.
Shared governance in ethno-politics is always going to be a disaster. Furthermore, when the internal democracy of the PPP and PNC are shaky, the Guyanese people are not getting the best leadership in a shared government situation, as the best citizens have no fair chance of serving their nation in a government of national unity.
Imagine the combination of Carl Greenidge and Ashni Singh running the finances of this country and you get the nightmare. What happens when these two proven failures start divvying up the spoils and handing it out to their ethnic constituencies to the exclusion of others? How is shared governance going to work in the absence of any motivation to change the constitution to fix the inequality problem in Guyana? Is Nestor opaque to the consensus that the thievery will attain even more gigantic proportions if the PPP and PNC join forces in shared governance?
Stop this stupidity about shared governance and government of national unity until and unless radical reforms have been made to ensure this country is not saddled with pathetic political baggage. If you want shared governance, allow independents to be elected to Parliament and share the party power with independents directly elected by their electoral districts.
To prove Nestor is engaging in senseless proliferation, it was the very PNC that murdered its own political future and the aspirations and potential of Guyanese in general, and its own African supporters, when it left that monstrosity of the 1980 Constitution intact. By failing to change that constitution, the PNC literally marginalized this country and its own African constituency and allowed the PPP to use that constitutional boondoggle to batter Guyanese and PNC supporters.
The PNC knew the PPP would do exactly what the PNC did; put the interests of its own supporters first and foremost. The PNC knew Africans were economically impoverished in 1992. It knew that Africans lacked capital to compete in the very capitalist system it was building to hand over to the PPP. It knew that when it was washed away from power, economically vulnerable Guyanese and its own Africans would be buried under the coming tsunami.
The PNC fully knew the totalitarian surmount of the powers of the presidency. It knew that Africans would be a perpetual minority excluded from power for eternity as long as free and fair elections continue, and the PPP would continue them, even under the threat of death, because it guaranteed them unchallengeable power.
The PNC knew all of these events. They saw the handwriting on the wall. They read the tea leaves. Yet, they bastardized Guyanese and Africans, crippled them and marginalized them by leaving that constitution and the decrepit system of absolute domination they fashioned for 28 years to endure beyond 1992.
Lurlene Nestor must not colour the PNC’s laziness, ineptitude and uncaringness for its own people with progressiveness, for it insults those Africans labouring under a system of inequality, unfairness and injustice the PNC has created and left intact in 1992 for them. The PNC, like the PPP, has been nothing but misery for its supporters. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid Lurlene Nestor, try the beverage of sober truth instead.
M. Maxwell

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