Begging is not the route to political empowerment

Sep 07, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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The parties of the coalition government are imbalanced in terms of national support. The AFC is a 10% party; the APNU is a 40% party, judging from the elections of 2011. The remainder of the parties will struggle to gain one per cent of the votes of the electorate.The WPA likes to present itself as bringing intellectual capital to the government. But that does not count for fart in the practical world of politics.
What matters are votes and support and the WPA has nothing of significance to show in either of these two areas.
It was the AFC’s electoral strength which allowed it to sign an agreement which was lopsided in favoring the AFC, with the APNU.
If the AFC did not go it alone in the 2011 elections and if it did not hold the balance of power in parliament as a result of its showing in those elections, it would not have been able to command the respect that allowed it to sign the Cummingsburg Accord in 2015.
The AFC is now being sidelined. But it does not care. It committed its own political suicide when the changes in its leadership this year, undermined its role within the coalition government. But the fact that it has electoral appeal means that it cannot be jettisoned from the coalition.
Not that that matters because the AFC is also allowing itself to be used as a doormat within the ruling administration. It did not demand that the APNU fully comply with the terms of the Cummingsburg Agreement.
It has not negotiated new terms. It has allowed important portfolios which it holds to be undermined within the government. It has not publicly called the government to account over excesses.
And its role in investigation of the Sussex Street Bond contract has led to a loss of credibility. The AFC is however surviving on the strength of its electoral appeal which for a third party is significant.
The WPA has never been able to command that sort of support. It was a victim of the return to ethnic politics in the free and fair elections in 1992. All the small parties suffered.
However, the WPA’s decline began much earlier. It began with the retreat to geographic fatalism of 1983 following the Grenada invasion. The actions by the Americans convinced the WPA that Uncle Sam would not allow a left-wing government within the region.
The WPA which was a Marxist party – Rodney was a Marxist- retreated to a vague programme known as Rodneyism, not recognizing the contradiction because Rodney did not retreat from principles and he was a Marxist.
This ideological retreat made it easier for the police state to smother the WPA. The evidence led in the Commission of Inquiry into the death of Walter Rodney exposed how far the police state was prepared to go to destroy the WPA and Rodney. It exposed the key role of former Commissioner of Police, Laurie Lewis, who even when the PPPC was in power secretly ordered immigration authorities to issue a renewal of the passport of fugitive Gregory Smith.
It shows that he was still doing the PNC’s dirty work behind the scenes under the PPPC government.
The pressure which was brought to bear under the WPA would have neutralized most political parties. The WPA’s impatient and impetuous radicals had no outlet following the 1980 assassination of Rodney and the subsequent ideological backpedaling by the party. They went into political abeyance.
The WPA was still managing to draw huge crowds at public meetings three years after Rodney’s death but the onslaught by security services on its membership had severely weakened the party; the struggle which it had waged lost steam.
The party, after its boycott of the 1980 elections, switched to parliamentary politics in 1985. It secured 1.4% of the votes but those elections could never be treated as a true assessment of the electoral support of the various political parties. They were more crooked than barbed wire. The military and the police were part of the subversion of those elections.
The WPA became a victim of the ethnic politics when it contested the 1992 elections. It got one seat based on the highest leftovers. It has never enjoyed strong popular support ever since. It will not dispute that.
Numbers are therefore not in WPA’s favour when it calls for the coalition parties to be empowered.
It knows, as one of its comrades admitted recently, that the party has to go out into the communities to reestablish its support. Unless it does this, unless it can pull a meeting of about 5,000 persons; unless it significantly increases its membership, it can call all it wants for empowerment, all it will get from the APNU is disregard. Ask Rupert!

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