The Alliance For Change needs to re-think its position

Aug 18, 2016 Letters

Dear Editor,
I always preferred the AFC as the party to run the affairs of Guyana. I saw Khemraj, Nigel and Moses as focused, intelligent, patriotic, men. The PPP and the PNC are national parties with huge followings but they are severely damaged; both of them. I can only support them if I hold my patriotic and objective nose. In fact, I think that had it not been for our entrenched racism and protracted brain drain, both the PNC and the PPP (or at least their leaders) would have been relegated to the dust heap of history. How any right thinking Guyanese could represent the philosophies and ideologies of those two parties is beyond my imagination. Those two parties have collectively steered Guyana into a ditch and have almost suffocated us for the last 50 years.
And yet none of the leaders of either party would offer even a modicum of apology to the Guyanese public for the albatross that they have been around our necks. There is this prevailing, pathetic, pretence from the supporters of either party, that their leaders did nothing, or is doing nothing, wrong. It is as if when you subscribe to a party allegiance in Guyana, you become brainwashed and blighted. Why Guyanese – the poorest and most abused citizens in the Western hemisphere – refuse to hold their political leaders accountable is fodder for clinical psychologists and social scientists to chew on for years to come.
We saw what 50 years of mismanagement have gotten us. We are the richest natural resource country in the Caribbean, yet our successive governments have abused us and raped our economy. They have partnered with likeminded cronies, despots and crooks – local and foreign – and have abused our trust. We have the lowest wage income brackets, the lowest GDP, the highest crime rate, the sickest people, the highest migration and deportation rates, the heights suicide rates and the most uneducated population. All this as we have come to our 50 years independence. And the fact is that all these negatives were bequeathed to us by only two parties, the PNC and the PPP.
Now we have come to more enlightened days. Technology and post modernism have gripped the world, yet Guyanese seem to be in a daze. We operate as if the shackles of nonchalance and dispassion have been welded around our collective psyche. In an age of the Obama-effect and the Arab Spring, Guyanese seem stuck in time.
By a very slim margin the old guards were removed in 2015. The new guards have come in with obvious, paralleled desires as the guards we removed. And the very scary reality is that the old guards are waiting in the wings, to unleash on the Guyanese people the very attitudes for which they were removed. And it seems as if the new guards – like the old guards – want to make sure that when they are removed from power, they never have to work another day in their life.
And to think that these atrocious behaviours, perpetuated by members of both side of the political spectrum, are being facilitated and endorsed by fellow Guyanese. There is an old familiar spiritual song which has as a part of its refrain this line, “There’s none so blind as he who willfully will not see”.
I began this letter by noting my admiration for the AFC. I will close by restating it. It is clear that the problems which this government now faces are as a result of wounds inflicted by the PNC arm of the Coalition. The Bishan Lin fiasco, the increases in ministers’ salaries, the BK steel debacle and billion dollar settlement, the parking meter mess and now the pharmaceutical bond dust-up. These are all doings that particularly benefited the PNC members of the government. The AFC continues to be silent and sheepish but aloft from the systematic confusion and charges of corruption.
I would want to think that the AFC, if only in the interest of self-preservation, will regroup and rethink its relationship with the Coalition. The AFC needs to do some introspection and consider its legacy. Does the AFC want to be tied to what appears to be a hemorrhaging, sinking PNC ship? I have always thought that the APNU/AFC marriage was a mistake; the incompatibilities are too many. The AFC has lost its voice. If the Coalition government is the nation’s parents, then what I am saying is that the AFC is just standing there, watching, while the PNC abuses their children. This should not be allowed to continue. Either the AFC asserts its rightful place in the marriage or realize that a divorce on the grounds of abuse and desertion is legally and ethically permissible.
Wendell Jeffrey

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