Either WPA members are non-existent or stupid

Jun 24, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The Working People’s Alliance (WPA) held a press conference last Monday, and what came out of the mouths of some of its leaders at that table confirms my long held belief that this country is the most macabre in the world, and there is no other country like it, where normal life is the exception not the rule.
A digression is in order. Almost a year now, there appeared a published letter by Tacuma Ogunseye, a current serving executive of the WPA and a founding member. In that letter, he announced that Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine, (who has been the co-leader of the WPA since the eighties, according to Christopher Ram in a missive in the newspapers) refused to discuss government’s business with the leadership of the WPA when the party has its statutory meetings.
Words cannot describe what a bizarre situation that was. And to think that the WPA leaders and members accepted that political morbidity. Why is that a depraved anomaly? Because governments are not elected and have never been elected. It is the political parties and individual politicians that are elected to run the government. Government is administered by state officials who are paid professionals. There is a dimension of government that is called policy-making. The paid professionals are mandated to carry out those policies.
Those policies do not come out of the skies. They come out of the heads of politicians who are elected to infuse the government with policies. The management of GuySuCo did not order the closure of a number of sugar estates last month. That came from the politicians in government, who are the only people that can downsize the sugar industry.
Elected parties then are tasked with bringing about changes, whether negative, like the repeal of Obamacare or the provision of free education, as in Germany.
It is utterly horrendous, in a coalition government, for one of the leaders in that party to tell his colleagues in his political party that party and government are not the same, and he cannot discuss government’s business with the party. Dr. David Hinds is making the news all over the country the past week, so he can be contacted to confirm what I am about to write in the next line.
David can tell you that I have always been critical in our discussions, with the politics of Rupert Roopnaraine. I told David that I felt that a long time ago, the WPA should have removed him. After Ogunseye’s letter was published, I can recall, David and I were having dinner on Sheriff Street one evening, and I brought up the Ogunseye disclosure, with the advice that the WPA call on Roopnaraine to explain. It never did. Now we have the bombshell delivered at the WPA press conference, in which it was stated that the WPA was never clear as to what its role was in government.
I quote from one media report; “Hinds said the WPA was not clear of what role the party should play in government.” Now here are the exact words of David; “Our view is that parties do not govern, governments govern.” I am afraid my good friend David is wrong. Parties govern. They direct the government. They engineer changes. The party in government in the UK wants the UK out of the EU, and is taking the UK out of the EU. That is the policy of the party in government right now in Britain.
How can the WPA not know (and for two years now) what it wanted when it became part of the government in May 2015? It is so simple that a schoolboy can explain it. Parties have ideologies, belief-systems, concepts, values that they think the country should be guided by.
For example, the Alliance For Change as a political party has accepted that Guyana’s laws should not mandate a prison sentence for small amounts of marijuana. It has tabled legislation in the House and it is on the order paper. The Republican Party of the US has as one of its core values the right to bear arms. The Republic Party will not vote for gun control and no Republican President will embrace gun control.
The macabre, bizarre, eerie thing about the WPA is that if Rupert Roopnaraine was not shifted from the Education Ministry, Guyanese would not have known all these things that came out of the WPA’s collective mouth on Monday, June 19, 2017. What were the members saying as to what was taking place in the WPA the past two years? Maybe there are no members. Maybe there are, but they are stupid people.

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Either WPA members are non-existent or stupid

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