The WPA is appearing dishonest and barefaced

Aug 22, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In April 2013, there was a daily protest outside the Sparendam community ground by folks from Plaisance who rejected the proposed e-governance cable tower inside the ground. I was part of that daily demonstration. One day, while a pot of cook-up was on the fire, there was an absorbing discussion on the WPA and PNC putting their differences aside and joining up to form APNU.
The discernible consensus was that the WPA played an integral role in the PNC winning back the five seats in 2011 it has lost in the 2006 General Elections. The analysis went this way: African Guyanese have been torn between the PNC and WPA since the death of Walter Rodney. It goes on to say that many Black people from the seventies onwards see Walter Rodney as a beloved leader and could never forgive the PNC for the excesses of state power that eventually claimed the life of Rodney.
An additional factor was that African youths admired the WPA because they see it as the party of radical intellectual traditions. This polemic in the community ground I heard before in similar circumstances in Linden the year before during the demonstrations over the hike in electricity rates. At sessions similar to the cook-up groundings at Sparendam, many Linden activists attribute the WPA’s contribution to the formation of APNU and 2011 electoral success of APNU as priceless. The overall feeling in 2011 onwards was that the division between Rodney and Burnham was a thing of the past.
Since the birth of APNU, I have heard several top stalwarts of the WPA extolling the role of WPA in the birth of APNU, the reclamation in 2011 of the seats lost in 2006 and the 2015 electoral victory. The WPA is a reality in government after 2015. It is part of a formation named APNU and that party is the senior partner in power with the AFC having the junior role. The question is; where are the manifestations of the WPA’s agenda, ideology, core values and programmes in policy-making as distinct from the PNC’s and AFC’s? The answer is that there are none.
Up comes a group named the WPA Overseas Associates. They issued a statement informing Guyanese that they recently had their third statutory meeting in Queens, New York. As you read the statement, it makes you both irritated and sad. Irritating that like its local counterpart, it is not dealing with the question of what is the role of the WPA in government. Sad in the sense is that you feel this once glorious party has descended into the chasm of dishonesty and opportunism.
Contrast the WPA’s invisibility with the AFC’s recent pronouncements. Here are some of the following AFC’s official positions that have been made public. It did not approve of BK Tiwari being a business advisor to the Government. It did not know about Harmon’s trip to China. It wants a reduction in the current portfolios that Harmon holds. It did not have an input in the selection of APNU-AFC candidates for the Georgetown City Council elections. It does not support the parking meter contract of City Hall. In two of those positions, the AFC formally met with the President Granger – Harmon’s portfolios and the City Council candidates.
To date there is no press statement by the WPA on any policy position of the Coalition Government that it finds contrary to the core values of the WPA. But wait! Who says it does not make pronouncements? The WPA says it does but to know that you have to see its television programme on Channel 9 every Sunday evening titled “Walter Rodney Groundings.” If you miss those programmes, then you cannot know what they said and did not say. How about a press statement? How about a letter to the press? How about a public statement in the name of the WPA as a coalition member of the government that officially adumbrates the policy positions of the WPA?
The AFC’s parliamentarian Michael Carrington has an amendment before Parliament to bring modern changes to the law as it relates to the penalties for possession of marijuana. The WPA as a partner in government must officially say, and not over a television channel, if it supports the amendment and will vote for it. Its silence would mean that is it not only dishonest but barefaced and unprincipled. I stood next to Dr. David Hinds on the balcony of the magistrate courts when he came to see me give testimony in the assault case against Kwame McKoy and company. Ask David; I told him the WPA is dead.

1 thoughts on “The WPA is appearing dishonest and barefaced”

Keith Williams August 22, 2016 at 8:34 am

Freddie your assertion that many African youths admire the WPA because of its radical posture is very insulting of the intelligence of this demographic. You are intimating that the demographic in question are so lacking in attention span, that their experience over the past 23 years, where their lives were worth less than a penny, and where a regime that the WPA helped to get into power is perceived to have collaborated with vigilante gangs to summarily execute them based on suspicion, do not, right or wrong, hold the WPA responsible for their experiences. And that is the silly kind of thinking that continue to stand as conventional wisdom in analysis of political issues in Guyana.

Imagine the analogy of US blacks admiring some African American led organization that lend political support to the furthest right of the Republican Party, helped it to get into power, watched it reshape the supreme court, ignore the killings of black youth by the police, and some obtuse wit or pundit writing a column arguing that African American youths admire that black led organization.

Freddie Kissoon has taken on the role of the expert in black thinking in Guyana, and his gaffes in this context is an example of the distance between some who see themselves as supportive of black causes, and the people who live out these experiences. Black young men and women did admire the WPA when it first entered the fray in Guyana politics, They did and still do admire Doctor Rodney, Doctor Hinds, and some others. But they were in no way confused about the implications an consequences of the WPA throwing its political support behind a Political Party whose governance style they had already experienced. They were not impressed by the WPA excoriating them for supporting Forbes Burnham and implying that support was based on racial or ethnic affiliation, when the WPA was aligned with a political organization with far stronger and more cemented tribal affinity than the PNC. To ignore these nuances in one’s categorizing of the perspective of black people in general, and black youth in particular, strikes me as one of the gravest examples of racial or ethnic hubris. Of that facet of thinking where one comes to the conviction that one has the authority to determine every aspect of group’s emotional reactions.