RISE and the fall of the Alliance For Change

Jul 05, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

This afternoon at Moray House at the junction of Quamina and Camp Streets, a new political party will come into existence. Its name is “RISE GUYANA.” It consists of names that people from Moleson Creek to the borders with Brazil and Venezuela would not frown on. Guyanese dismiss names they have never heard about or people they have never seen. But they gravitate to personalities with status and fame.
West Indian people like their politicians to have qualifications and to be persons with access to resources. RISE GUYANA has such people in their leadership. They have learnt from the Alliance For Change and the success that came the way of that party because of the big names. The rise of RISE GUYANA coincides with the fall of the Alliance For Change (AFC). What RISE GUYANA hopes to do is to replicate the electoral success of the AFC. I have dealt with that configuration in yesterday’s column so it needs no elaboration.
What cries out for analysis is the reason for the decline of the AFC. I have had to answer too many questions put to me about my criticism of the AFC given the fact that I campaigned vigorously for it in the 2015 elections and used my column to argue for their continued success from 2005. I was in that situation up to yesterday at the brunch of Vincent Alexander’s Forbes Burnham Foundation held at the Spicy Dish Restaurant at David Street and Vlissengen Road in Kitty.
A number of high governmental officials came up to the table where David Hinds and I were eating and the politics flowed. I had to explain again why I functioned with the AFC. I offered only one explanation around the table. Today, I will add another one. I told the folks, yesterday, that I wanted the removal at all cost, of the PPP. I believe deeply in my heart that the post 1999 PPP until its fall in May 2015 had become a diseased, depraved, semi-civilized power machine. If fate did not intervene in May 2015, the PPP would have destroyed Guyana. I was afraid for my life and my family and friends. For me, the PPP had to go even if at my age I had to participate in unorthodox politics to bring it down.
The second reason which I am repeating in this column was that I owed Khemraj Ramjattan and Nigel Hughes enormous debts, so large that they cannot be measured. These men helped me when the society stood silent and watched me get libel writ after libel writ. I had a profound moral obligation to campaign for these two men that I admired and respected.
Nigel has left the AFC and Khemraj thinks that I have become an anti-government critic to the point where he attacks me using undiplomatic language.
I was speechless when David Hinds told me that he used an egregious exclamation to describe my politics and David’s in an interview with Christopher Ram. I told David it was his misinterpretation that Khemraj is a dear friend and would not say those things about me. But David insisted that I look at the interview. Up to this day, I cannot believe Khemraj would say that about a friend who in many ways has helped his political career because of my journalism and activism. And to note that since he became Vice-President I never asked him for a favour.
But it was David Hinds that I endure the brunt of the AFC’s deterioration into degeneracy. Apart from Khemraj’s poisonous remark about David and ME, the AFC issued a press release attacking David in horrible way saying that he should be grateful the APNU+AFC election victory has now given him freedom to talk. How ironic. It was the activism of David Hinds from the seventies onwards that has made people like Moses Nagamootoo and others to be where they are today.
Finally, I am fed up writing about the dishonesty of the AFC for blaming me for stating that President Granger appointed three AFC ministers outside of any discussion with the AFC and one is his son-in-law, Dominic Gaskin. The same Gaskin said in an email to the AFC leadership that I have seen, “You see the idiotic nonsense Freddie Kissoon wrote?”
By now all of Guyana should know it was at an AFC press conference that Raphael Trotman said that. I have the tape. Pease call me, as Norris Witter did, for a copy. For me, these are examples of AFC degeneracy. The rise of RISE GUYANA is about the fall of the AFC.

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