Latest update June 16th, 2026 12:40 AM
Yes, APNU-AFC making the same mistakes as the PPP did
My January 20th column was captioned, “Is APNU-AFC learning from the mistakes of the PPP?” In that reflection, I wrote the following, “The PPP returned to power in 1992 and showed that it didn’t learn a damn thing from its years in power, between 1957 and 1964. From 1992 to the time it fell from power in May 2015, successive post-Jagan PPP presidents showed they knew nothing about the sociological dangers that inhere in Guyanese society.
The PPP Government was afraid to bat once Muralitharan or Warne was at the wicket ready to bowl. It gave the bowlers a large psychological advantage. As the years wore on, this lack of self-confidence led from one disaster to another.
“Three immense faults led to rut in the leadership of each PPP decision-maker – lack of public relations activism, evasion of the press and obdurate unwillingness to apologize.
“In politics, once a policy has congenital defects and you still need to implement it, then you have to use extraordinary vocabulary to market it. Silence on the policy in the face of questions from the society will weaken your credibility if you do not at least attempt to explain and polish; some will call it spin.”
What we are witnessing in this country is the same hide and seek in political deportment as we saw for fifteen years with Jagdeo and Ramotar. Guyana will never change if it does not produce transformative leadership. If anyone out there thinks that the PPP will change its way of acting and thinking now that it is in the opposition, he/she is naïve. Here is an example of the leopard and its spots.
The media invited five candidates contesting the Kingston, Georgetown Ward to express their intentions. The only candidate that did not turn up was the PPP’s; one can say refused to be present, since contacts for two successive days failed to persuade him. Yet this is a man that wants us to make him a policy-maker for the capital city.
Someone in the APNU-AFC Government decided that there were financial and economic reasons for closing Wales Estate. Obviously that person had to provide the statistics and details to the hierarchy of power before the decision was made; that hierarchy made the decision. But the Government behaved the way the PPP did when it was in power – it refused to defend itself in front of the media and in debates.
The occasion was a panel discussion last Friday on the estate closure sponsored by Moray House. People who failed GuySuCo, helped to destroyed the sugar industry, encouraged politics to override strategic decisions on sugar and whose lives were/are driven by the race divide in Guyana, went to that panel event and offered their viewpoints and tabled their solutions for saving Wales.
Not one of the persons from the top of the pyramid of power that made the closure decision showed up to defend what they decided for this nation.
Times like these you see the character in President Forbes Burnham. He removed the train in Guyana. He had an alternative. If there was a panel discussion on rejecting the dissolution of the train service and if any of his experts had refused to attend, Burnham would have mandated their presence with the words, “go and defend government’s policies.”
I am becoming tired of people telling me – “give the government a chance, they are a few months in power.” I keep getting that refrain all the time but as time passes on, I am not seeing the transformational leadership that Guyana so desperately needs. The people who say give the new APNU-AFC administration a chance mean well, but they must attempt rational explanations.
Yes, give them a chance, but weeks before local government polls, the City Council brutalized poor vendors and like the Moray House invisibility, the leaders in the Coalition said not one word in support of those poor people.
Yes, give them a chance, but they are yet to explain what became of the 2015 election campaign promise about the reform of laws relating to sentence structure for marijuana convictions. Yes, give them a chance, but they took that chance Guyanese gave them in May 2015 and extended by almost a mile, the barriers around Parliament, the very barriers APNU-AFC leadership voted to remove in 2012.
In other words, the present parties in government are ignoring a Parliamentary decision that they passed. I hope if the APNU-AFC loses the 2016 local government elections they do not do a Jagdeo on this nation and claim that the elections were rigged.
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