PNC, WPA, AFC: Ménage à trois exposed

Jun 18, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The crescendo was building up, but suffered an interregnum when the Ministry of the Presidency and the top leadership of the AFC in a state of frenzy attempted to guillotine me. It didn’t work because I had a smoking gun – a tape.
At his first press conference after winning the contest for AFC leader with Khemraj Ramjattan, Raphael Trotman told the nation that outside of the Cummingsburg Accord, which delineated the parameters (my word) of power-sharing after the 2015 election victory, President Granger created three ministers on his own – Raphael Trotman, himself; Granger’s son-in-law, Dominic Gaskin; and Agriculture Minister, Noel Holder.
That was a riveting revelation, so I simply wrote a column on Trotman’s announcement to do the math to see if the AFC got its forty percent of Cabinet seats as stipulated in the Accord. If the President chose three Ministers on his own, outside of the Accord, then that still entitled the AFC to its forty percent. The first salvo against me, instead of Trotman, was fired by the Office of the President, which issued a press release accusing me of mischief.
Up to this day, I don’t know what mischief I invented. One week after that (I assumed the APNU and AFC leadership met on my column and the AFC was pressured by APNU to denounce me) AFC leaders put out a press release rejecting the column. Now mind you, not chastising me for repeating what Trotman told the nation, but accusing me of saying what came out of Trotman’s mouth.
This was incestuous politics as morbid as any manifestation of that art in the Jagdeo presidency. The President and the AFC leadership substituted my name for Trotman. They had to protect their friend and let the blame fall on me. But I have my protection too. Former President of the TUC and current head of the National Workers’ Union, Norris Witter, flew into Kaieteur News office and requested to hear the tape. He said if Trotman uttered those words, then the President and Trotman must explain to the nation.
Witter was given a copy of the tape by me. The hangman’s noose of the Office of the President and the guillotine of the AFC missed me, because I had a tape of what Trotman said, and the media in Guyana had the identical tape.
All of this becomes contextually relevant in the light of the Rupert Roopnaraine ministerial transfer issue. What we have on display right now is the nature of the ménage à trois between the PNC, WPA and AFC, and the ill-shaped forms of coalition politics. The first question; did the President go behind the back of the Cummingsburg Accord and snatch three top names from the AFC in a bold act of realpolitik? The President said no, he didn’t. The AFC said they created the ministries for Holder and Gaskin under the Accord. But why would someone as huge in politics as Trotman go on record as saying the contrary?
The second question relates to the WPA. If the AFC is saying that it assigned its leaders to the ministries it currently has, did the same process evolve in the APNU coalition with regards to Cabinet allocation? It doesn’t seem so. First Rupert Roopnaraine was de facto Natural Resources Minister, and appeared in the press as such with appropriate gear visiting a collapsed mining pit where a dozen miners died. Suddenly, he became Education Minister.
It is his current assignment at the Public Service Ministry that makes the Trotman revelation relevant. And this is because the Working People’s Alliance has told the nation that as a coalition member, it was not consulted in the ministerial shift. You don’t need to be a philosopher to understand what the WPA is saying.
The WPA is implying that the Education Ministry was a WPA subject area as part of APNU’s Cabinet identifications, just as APNU did with the AFC in the Cummingsburg Accord. If the WPA Minister is to be reassigned, then let the WPA choose, because the WPA has a Cabinet portfolio
Why Trotman’s emanation is germane to the Roopnaraine issue is if the WPA is saying it was not consulted, it is then possible that Granger did pick those three Ministers that Trotman named and the AFC was not consulted, and Trotman spilled the beans at his press conference. Knowing that Trotman may have said what he shouldn’t have, the President and the AFC hurried to do damage control and attacked me. Well, this time, it is the WPA accusing the President, so the President cannot prepare a hangman’s noose for me.

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