The moral and physical non-existence of the WPA

Sep 23, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

One of the stalwarts of the WPA, Tacuma Ogunseye, has referred to me in a letter to this newspaper (Tuesday, September 19, 2017, “The politics, activism, journalism and dishonesty of Freddie Kissoon”) as dishonest based on the contents of a recent column I did. This is the trademark of this activist who claims to be one of the leaders of the party of Walter Rodney and whose leaders describe themselves as Rodneyite.
There is nothing Rodneyite about many of those who were once with the WPA or who are still with the WPA and are laying claims to the legacy of Rodney. If there is anyone with a political culture that is as backward as you can find in the PPP and PNC, it is Ogunseye. You can find his culture in his letters.
When he defended Minister Harmon when the press questioned Harmon’s visit to China, he saw an ulterior motive in the press. What was stupid about that it was the same press whose exposures of the PPP regime caused Ogunseye’s party, APNU to be in power today.
When I write about criticism of the REO in Region Two, he saw an ulterior motive against the new government. When Chris Ram analyzed the SARA Bill, he said Ram was always motivated by intellectual envy of Rupert Roopnaraine. When Sase Singh criticized the government’s economic directions, he accused Singh of being part of a PPP plot.
Every political observer who does not agree with Ogunseye’s belief has an agenda. Ogunseye will not accept that people can write because they want to express a disagreement.
We come now to his letter. He accused me of dishonesty and deceit because I should know better in a specific complaint I made against the WPA. Here is it. Professor Clive Thomas was chosen by President Cheddi Jagan to be Minister of Economic Planning in 1992. The official position of the WPA at the time was that Jagan should have let the WPA decide who it wanted to be in the Cabinet. It rejected Dr. Jagan’s offer.
In 2015, President Granger chose Dr. Roopnaraine to be in the Cabinet. In May this year, the WPA at a press conference said it was not consulted.
Here now is Ogunseye’s justification of his label of my dishonesty. “ …This is not unlike him (Kissoon), being outright dishonest…He is well aware that the two situations are politically and fundamentally different…Jagan was playing games with his ministerial offer. At the time Jagan made his offer to the WPA, the executive committee of the party did not consider it to be a serious one.
The political situation in 2015 was different since the WPA, a founding partner in the APNU and member of the victorious coalition, was entitled to have one of its top leaders appointed to a ministerial post. It is true that President Granger did not adhere to political convention and offered the ministry to the party thereby allowing the WPA to name its minister. Instead, he named Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine to the position of Minister of Education in the coalition government.”
Ogunseye goes on to explain why the WPA did not protest what President Granger did. “The way it was done offended the WPA but the executive felt that the political principle, which is the basis of our objection, would have been lost in a public polemic given the celebratory mood among coalition supporters. We also felt that in the minds of the populace at the time that our principled position, given their political consciousness, would be seen by the masses as ‘splitting hairs’”.
I will leave it to readers to judge for themselves what to make of this pathetic and immoral nonsense. The WPA accepted President Granger’s unilateral appointment of Roopnaraine because, had the WPA made a fuss it would not have gone down well with the society seeing that the Guyanese people were in a celebratory mood.
What is sickening is the dishonesty of Ogunseye and the WPA. Roopnaraine appeared in the newspaper via a government press release in appropriate garb and long boots visiting a collapsed mining pit where a dozen miners were killed and his designation was listed as Minister of Natural Resources.
Ogunseye knows this but he is unethical, unprincipled and downright dishonest in leaving that aspect of the WPA’s relations with APNU after the election results. Of course no one from the WPA will officially correct Ogunseye or explain. We will not hear from the WPA leadership at all. But that is understandable. How can you hear from a group that does not exist?

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The moral and physical non-existence of the WPA

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