An iconic woman and her exit from the WPA

Sep 16, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

As an analyst you have to keep a bank of knowledge on what is taking place in certain organisations. I have my contacts with PPP, PNC, AFC personnel. Over the decades, I hardly maintained an interest in the Working People’s Alliance. I have preserved a personal friendship with some WPA comrades that I met and struggled with in the seventies.
I do not ask them about the WPA because they know my attitude to the continued existence of the WPA which has been adumbrated in dozens of columns over the past twenty years. To make a long story short, my career as a social activist and a media operative hardly zeroes in on the WPA which I honestly believe is not a functional entity.
In my Wednesday column, I mentioned that WPA founder-member, Andaiye, was a member of the WPA. She sent me an e-mail to say that was not so. I really didn’t know that she was not close to the WPA as I didn’t know that too about Christopher Ram. Ram wrote a letter to Kaieteur News last year in response to one of my columns in which I named him as A WPA member. He informed readers he was not a member. This was a shock to me because I know just as night follows day that Christopher Ram for years was part of the WPA executive.
So I enquired from David Hinds about clarification. He told me that Ram was a long standing executive of the party but never held a membership card. David said Ram was legally right to deny he was a member. Of course there is the popular distinction of de jure and de facto. All these years I never knew that Andaiye had resigned from the WPA. In her email to me she said that she submitted her resignation twenty years ago and she made it public.
She politely asked that I find some way to inform readers gently. She was quite modest to say that she doesn’t want an official retraction from me like some others who think they are so important that you must boldly withdraw what you wrote. Well, here it is Andaiye; my modest transmission of your formation that you left the WPA over twenty years ago. I would have loved for Andaiye to tell me why she chose that path. She was a founding-member and one of the most admired leaders of the WPA.
I have profound respect and admiration for this iconic woman. She is one of the WPA fighters who had an early influence on my politics. I think Guyana has lost a precious activist now that she has taken a quiet life due to illness. I didn’t think of asking her to analyze the WPA for me so I could put it into this column.
Somehow, I suspect she would not want to go public although very succinctly she wrote in the email that she doesn’t want to be associated with the kind of politics that characterises WPA.
And what is the kind of politics associated with the WPA? What has happened with the WPA since May of this year has no parallel in politics anywhere else in the world. The WPA’s co-leaders are Rupert Roopnaraine and Clive Thomas. The WPA official statement on Roopnaraine’s Cabinet appointment was that the WPA was not asked to select a member to be named to the Cabinet.
And strangely, Roopnaraine has not contradicted his party. But the President said the WPA was consulted in May after the election results. Strangely again, Roopnaraine has not contradicted the President.
More confusion followed. The President removed Roopnaraine from the Education Ministry. The WPA said it was not consulted. The President asserted it was. Roopnaraine has not contradicted his party or his president. Confusion deepened when Roopnaraine resigned from government. The party said it was informed by Roopnaraine and the party concurred. Then Roopnaraine met with President Granger and recanted his resignation.
The WPA intoned that before doing so Roopnaraine did not communicate his intention to withdraw his resignation. Roopnaraine has not responded to that statement from the WPA. As it stands, the APNU’s position is that Roopnaraine is the WPA representative in Cabinet, currently holding the portfolio for the public service. In the meantime, the other co-leader, Clive Thomas, has stayed away from all the confusion, not writing even one line on the controversies even though he speaks to the press on SARA and GuySuCo issues and he writes a weekly column in the Stabroek News. Any surprises at all of this? Of course, there shouldn’t be. This is Guyana.

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