Far from Heaven: The AFC’s entanglement with the PPP

Aug 14, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I was at a town hall meeting with Gerhard Ramsaroop of the AFC in Linden last year, called to discuss the Government’s intention to raise electricity rates. A rumour began circulating among the attendees that APNU had agreed to the electricity rate. In the audience, acidic adjectives were being thrown at APNU. People became agitated.
The anger was not directed at APNU as a party, but with a specific event – the meeting APNU had with the Government. The tipping point was why “our leaders are talking to this Government.” Those were the sentiments I heard among the attendees.
Let’s go back to the letter in this newspaper that Elton McRae (of ACDA and the 1832 Coalition) wrote questioning the TUC’s dialogue with PM Sam Hinds and NICIL’s Winston Brassington over the exclusion of Guyanese labour at the Marriott Hotel construction. McRae wasn’t attacking the TUC or questioning its leader’s integrity. All he wrote was that given the nature of the Government, you aren’t going to get anything from Hinds and Brassington.
Leonard Craig (of the People’s Parliament) jumped into the exchange and was more candid with the TUC. He asked; what do you expect to get from the zero sum games the PPP plays?
In my support of McRae, my friend Lincoln Lewis took umbrage over the mistaken belief that I implied that TUC was at fault.All I did was to echo the sentiments of McRae, Craig and hundreds of thousands of others – the PPP is not going to negotiate with the opposition and extend concessions; it is not in their nature, so why are you talking to them.
The point I am making is that the large votes the opposition got in the last general elections came from people who don’t want their parties to support policies and endeavours of the PPP Government, because they see the PPP as a group that is obsessed with power and will destroy Guyana rather than compromise with the opposition.
I think the AFC leadership, with a few exceptions, appears naïve in the eyes of these voters, in that the AFC believes it can dialogue with the Government as what obtains in normal polities. But Guyana is not a normal polity and the PPP is an exceptionally negative political actor when comparisons are made in this hemisphere. What the AFC hopes to achieve by voting four times with the PPP in Parliament is a scenario that they will have to explain to countless people in the coming weeks and months.
It is not the importance of hydro power for Guyana that people will raise. That has never been a sticking point with the population. Guyanese want hydropower. It has a long history dating back to President Burnham, who almost made it happen.
What people are going to ask the AFC is why you voted four times in the same day with the PPP in Parliament, when that party will attack you as soon as it gets what it wants, and how are you going to get the PPP to do some of the valuable things that the AFC and APNU want for Guyana.
It will raise the nation’s curiosity when the AFC responds to a particular question on the composition of the Local Government Commission. The PPP insisted on an eight-member panel, but the opposition wisely rejected that long ago. And for valid reason – eight can give you gridlock while seven will result in a definitive verdict.
Surely, the AFC must have questioned the PPP’s patriotic intention since the party entered Parliament in 2006. The questions must have been mountainous after Mr. Jagdeo became President, and it is generally interpreted that Mr. Ramotar operates within the context of Jagdeoism. Surely then the AFC must have asked itself why the PPP wanted eight instead of seven.
Did the AFC have a difficult task in tackling that subject? If it did, then its experience since 2006 will become a subject for national debate. The simple answer is that with eight, it gives the PPP an avenue for filibuster. And in the interim, the Minister of Local Government may have to intervene.
The PPP is a fox. It is not a stupid organization. It is no insult to say that if the AFC doesn’t know about this vulpine nature of the PPP, then, how much does it know about the nuances, dimensions and directions of Guyanese politics. For those who voted against the PPP in 2012, the devil may be nearer to Heaven than the PPP. Does the combined opposition know of this feeling of its supporters?

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Far from Heaven: The AFC’s entanglement with the PPP

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