A CASE OF SURVIVAL

Mar 05, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The AFC should not add to the confusion of its many members who are attempting to rationalize why their party entered into an alliance with APNU to contest the May 2015 elections. The AFC has offered a bizarre explanation: it says that no alliance could have seen the demise of the party.
This is a case of employing reverse logic. It is by entering into a partnership with APNU, which is effectively the PNCR, that the AFC risks downgrading. It risks losing its identity and its independence. It can no longer present itself as a third force party or claim that it is seeking to break with Guyana’s polarized culture.
Its alliance with the PNCR will have the effect of asking the electorate to make a choice between the Indian- dominated PPP and the African dominated PNCR. Instead of fostering a new political culture in Guyana, instead of offering the Guyanese people an alternative to both of the main political parties that have come to embody the political problem in Guyana, the AFC has joined with one of these parties. This is after it was established on the basis of, and after publicly proclaiming that it would never enter into any alliance with either the PNCR or the PPP.
The AFC’s reasoning as to why it risked imminent collapse unless it joined with the APNU is that if it did not people would have said that the party was racial and that it was after power. Well, this again is a case of reverse logic.
It was the AFC that put on the table what it said was a non-negotiable proposal. It was the AFC that said that it had to lead any alliance with APNU. It was the AFC which was proposing Moses Nagmootoo as its candidate. The objective was clear. The AFC wanted to appeal to PPP supporters by having a candidate that would allow these supporters to feel secure under any coalition with APNU.
There was logic and there was merit in this proposal. The only way that any coalition could win was if PPP supporters voted in significant numbers, estimated at between 30 000 to 60 000, for the coalition. This is according to one analyst who is part of APNU. Thus unless the AFC could guarantee that it would bring an additional 30,000 votes at the minimum, that is, votes apart from its support at the 2011 elections, no coalition with APNU was going to win the election. Having an AFC nominee as the Presidential candidate for the coalition could have offered the ethnic security needed to get these extra votes.
The AFC wilted during the negotiations with APNU and abandoned its non- negotiable position. This party which had refused to budge in the face of national pressure to pass the Anti-Money Laundering and the Countering of Terrorism Bill, this party which despite all the pleas for it to act in the national interest and not hold the government to ransom on such a critical obligation, is the same party that could not hold out on APNU for the Presidential slot.
Why then is the AFC so concerned when people accuse it of betrayal? Why then is the AFC disturbed when people claim that they traded the presidential candidacy in return for three Vice Presidents and a guarantee of twelve seats in the National Assembly?
So it is not that if it had not ceded the presidency that people will say that it was acting in a certain way and that all it wanted was power. It was the AFC itself that had put up s a non-negotiable position of an Indian candidate to lead the coalition. And it was the AFC that opted to remove itself as a Third Force and join with APNU in return for twelve seats and three Vice Presidents.
We have heard nothing at the launching about a common programme. The AFC is making a leap of faith. It has published the banns for a wedding without knowing what the wedding plans will be like. There is no common programme agreed as yet for the alliance, yet the AFC has gone on the stage for a launching. They are in effect launching without any agreement as yet on a common programme. This is a party that is in absolute confusion.
But in sympathy with them perhaps they saw the writing on the wall. The walkabout in Skeldon before the Valentine‘s Day Agreement must have driven home to them that their support base in Berbice was gone. And the poor response to the meeting in Adelphi must have confirmed this fact.
Perhaps they saw their future as bleak and decided that it is best they piggy back on APNU instead of being humiliated at the elections by going it alone. Perhaps it was indeed a case of survival!

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A CASE OF SURVIVAL

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