What was Colvin Heath-London doing at a PNC meeting?

Mar 15, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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In 1974, at a congress of the ruling PNC at that party’s head office in Sophia, Georgetown, the proceedings of that confabulation came to be known as the Sophia Declaration.
Dr. Tyrone Ferguson’s book, “To Survive Sensibly or to Court Heroic Death: Management of Guyana’s Political Economy, 1965-1985” remains the definitive study on the reign of President Forbes Burnham. In fact, it is the only book published on the government of Forbes Burnham.
One can assume that Ferguson had access to all the material he needed when he became President Desmond Hoyte’s Chief of Staff (known at that time as the Head of the Presidential Secretariat). Ferguson on page 157 quoted a section of Burnham’ speech at the congress; “It was also decided that the Party should assume unapologetically its paramountcy over the government which is merely one of its executive arms. The comrades demanded that the country be given practical and theoretical leadership at all levels by the PNC which had become the major national institution.”
After quoting Burnham, Ferguson wrote; “The period after 1974 was to be dominated by the conscious effort to put into operation in practical terms the doctrine of party paramountcy. This period saw the controversial efforts to extend party control over critical institutional sectors…its practical pursuit entailed the start of the imposition of authoritarian political control.”
It is outside of the scope of a newspaper column to elaborate on how detrimental the paramountcy doctrine was to the credibility of the rule of Burnham; suffice it to say it was one of the strongest weapons used by both the WPA and the PPP against Burnham.
If you liked Burnham, you wished he didn’t take such a direction. If you disliked Burnham, then the paramountcy doctrine was a gift to use to weaken him. It was policies like the paramountcy doctrine that led to increasing acceptance of the politics of the WPA.
Onto this day, on discussing the nature of Burnham’s rule, the doctrine controversy takes centre stage. Despite his political erudition, the paramountcy road was a huge mistake. But knowing Burnham, as Hamilton Green said in a recent interview with me, “who could have talked to Burnham?” What Burnham did was to borrow the practice from places like North Korea, Cuba and the USSR. But you cannot transplant institutions from one culture and put them into another culture that has nothing in common with the other.
In North Korea, Cuba and the USSR, the communist governments there came into power after fighting terrible autocratic domination (after a war in Korea, the monarchy in Russia and oligarchy in Cuba). Guyana was different. This was a former British colony that had a fair amount of democratic culture before Burnham came into power. Citizens came to accept some British practices that they considered good and just, one being the civil servant must be neutral, judges must be independent.
President Desmond Hoyte dismantled the paramountcy temple and discarded the Declaration of Sophia. In fact, Hoyte sought to resuscitate the doctrine of the neutral civil servant.
Dr. Ferguson himself had no politically connected background and was never associated with the PNC party. Many of Hoyte’s permanent secretaries had no political background and political connections. When the PPP came to power in 1992, it reintroduced party paramountcy, but in subtle ways.
Some PPP leaders were made permanent secretaries. Top PPP leader, Roger Luncheon, became the chairman of the NIS. President Cheddi Jagan invented the Fraud Squad to oversee Customs and Excise, and it was staffed with PPP personnel. The Council of the University was the largest proof of paramountcy of the party under the PPP. The PPP is gone and we have the PNC back in power. Could there be a continuation of where the PPP left off?
Last week, the North American chapter of the PNC had its congress. Party leaders like Joe Harmon addressed the meeting. Also using the podium was Mr. Colvin Heath-London, who at the time was a technical employee with GuySuCo. He has now been named chairman of the board. He is advising on the divestment issue. What was he doing addressing a meeting of the ruling party discussing GuySuCo matters?
If he is a PNC member, then he is in his right to appear at a party congress. But he is also a public sector manager. The question arising then is if he is a PNC member, did he get his GuySuCo placement because of his PNC affiliation? If the answer to all these questions are no, then Heath-London needs to explain why he was at a PNC meeting discussing business of the State.

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