The only boots the AFC will wear are jumbie shoes

Aug 12, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

It is the season of political theatre and comical histrionics. Maybe the season began early because local government election is in the air. The AFC started the fun and Professor Clive Thomas followed, and the WPA joined in and held on to the circus rope, and President Granger showed his so-called acrobatic skills.
Last week, the AFC, Thomas and the WPA sailed away in a time machine, which took them into the past where they began to untie Prometheus. Then the gods awakened them and chased them away back to the land that Clifford Krauss described as a watery wilderness.
Last week, as AFC leaders expressed their fervency of contesting the November local polls without their senior autocratic partner, APNU, one of its leaders declared that the party is ready to put on its war boots and show Guyana how strong it is.
The war boots were worn when the AFC was on the warpath trying to topple the Jagdeoite army. Heavily fitted out in their long black boots that cut a formidable appearance, the AFC went from Georgetown to Ankoko on the border with Venezuela singing the chorus line – “it is time.”
The boots went through mud, slush and miasma, and the theme reverberated all over the 83,000 square miles of Guyana – “it is time.” Then time came. The war boots were given away to the inmates of the palms, and the AFC clowns began to wear Air Jordans. Indeed the Air Jordans propelled them into space where they mixed with the king of the gods, Zeus. The war had ended. The PPP was defeated, and Nancy Sinatra’s boots were thrown away.
The devils now wore Prada and they palavered with their superiors in power – the girls and boys from Burnham’s party and Granger’s army buddies. Yes, it was time. Time not to learn, time not to change, time not to govern, but time to feast the way the jumbies did in Hotel California. Remember those famous lines from one of rock’s most memorable anthems:

“Mirrors on the ceiling
The pink champagne on ice and she said
We are all just prisoners here of our own device
And in the master’s chambers they gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can’t kill the beast.”

Hotel California is where jumbies live. And the AFC lives in Hotel California. So when one of those leaders jumped up and said he is putting on his war boots, he means his jumbie shoes. The beast killed the AFC. “It is time” has now become time to die. And the AFC is dying. The 2018 local government elections will be its graveyard, and like in the derelict mansion of Pablo Escobar where carrions pick on the bones of the dead tycoons, the carnivorous birds will sleep on top of the jumbie boots while waiting to sail away to their nocturnal resting place on Air Jordans.
Like the AFC’s journey into the past, Professor Clive Thomas rode the waves back to the rivers of the seventies where Walter Rodney preached from the altar of radical political economy and as Rodney spoke, Thomas made notes and wrote books on what Rodney echoed. Thomas was enjoying his ride in his time machine as his audience clapped and jumped from their seats when he demanded one million petro dollars for every citizen. Then Thomas got up from his seat and kissed the past with heart, mind and soul when he made reference to the term he coined when he and Walter Rodney ruled the waves – “the poor and powerless.”
The gods jolted Thomas back to 2018 where he wears the boots of his neo-liberal bosses who put Thomas in charge of sugar and under Thomas, six thousand sugar workers with one swipe of his pen lost their livelihood. For one fleeting moment, Thomas thought he was living in the same house with Rodney in the seventies. When he came back to reality, the poor and powerless from the sugar industry were standing in front of him. But his neo-liberal bosses told him to look elsewhere.
And where did he look? To his is party, the WPA. He urged his old party romantics to fire up the masses to secure those million petro dollars. But the WPA is wearing jumbie boots like the AFC and living in Hotel California. Even the ghosts in the cemetery cannot recognize the WPA. And an aging jumbie asked one of the WPA stalwarts – “to which era do you belong?”
Finally, President Granger has joined the circus, telling the nation he now discovered that he must hold regular press conferences. Clifford Krauss where are you?

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The only boots the AFC will wear are jumbie shoes

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