Has the AFC become KFC?

Jan 30, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In today’s jargon, when you want a quick bite, you say let’s have a piece of KFC, meaning fast food not necessarily any brand. The analogy of the AFC to KFC has to do with the word, “fast.”
The food is quickly made in front your eyes, and your presence doesn’t take long in the restaurant. It comes to your table almost immediately, you eat, and you’re gone. The AFC came like lightening on the scene and like fast food it came upon your mind immediately. Like fast food, it was quickly cooked and quickly digested. Has the presence of the AFC from Guyana gone?
I touched down about 5.50 P.M. last Saturday evening at the Vreed-en-Hoop school where the AFC held its national congress. By the time I got there, the news was already out, that the leader lost to his competitor and the incumbent general-secretary lost badly to someone less known than him in national politics.
How do you explain this? Shouldn’t Khemraj Ramjattan by a straight vote have beaten Raphael Trotman? How come a minister holding one of the most crucial portfolios and in the news almost every day was beaten by someone who is not half as known in Guyana as the Minister?
When I arrived in the school yard, the conference was over; only the ballots for the 12-person national executive were being tabulated. As I walked further, I was greeted with a few complaints by people I knew from the 2015 campaign. One of them brought a box of cook-up rice and a bottle of juice, put them in my hand and then told me in annoyed terms that the motion from Region Two delegates on the performance of the Minister of Agriculture was not put to the floor. I told him he must demand an answer. Others chipped in and said they weren’t even given an explanation.
I wasn’t surprised. Guyana never had a democratic party culture. The leadership of the PPP and the PNC, from Jagan’s and Burnham’s time, right up to January 2017, the top of the party hierarchy, decides how congress is run. She is dead and gone but a stalwart like Dr. Faith Harding went public with accusations that the PNC’s leadership election, after Robert Corbin stepped down, wasn’t straightforward.
I have friends in the AFC leadership that I respect and admire, but the AFC political culture is not substantially different from the two Leviathans. As the night wore on, I received another box of food (this time chicken curry) and the failed Region Two motion was raised over and over with me. My advice was to confront whichever leader did the undemocratic thing and killed the motion.
To analyze why Ramjattan lost to Raphael Trotman and David Patterson to Marlon Williams will take more than a column and this piece here is already halfway so the assessment will have to wait. In brief, I would say it has to do with the performance of the AFC in government. No other person has put it the way David Hinds has done in his writings. He observed that the Coalition came to power amidst colossal (my word) expectations that the Coalition era would be a complete break with past governments.
On the contrary, the Guyanese people saw not only the continuation of old ways of doing things but forms of regression. New taxes on government services and documents have taken in a number that is more than a dozen, including the facetious but absurd horse-drawn cart license. More importantly, if a survey was taken tomorrow, the attitude among vendors would be that the PPP’s Carol Sooba and the PPP control of the Georgetown municipality was better than what presently obtains from the APNU+AFC Council.
I am willing to wager that if elections were held tomorrow either the ruling coalition would lose the City Council or the PPP would have a better showing than the two councilors the party presently has.
The AFC in particular got trapped in its culture that it was born with. From 2005 onwards it denigrated the PPP and PNC. It instilled into the people that listened to and accepted it that the AFC stood for a new way, new culture, new thinking, new directions. The AFC won seats in 2006 and 2011 because those who voted for it wanted Guyana to go in the direction.
There are no new directions, but even more disturbing, is what you’ll find if you content-analyze the language of AFC leaders since they got into power. They sound just like the PPP and PNC people they criticized in 2005. I will look at the elections in another column.

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