Questions Clive Thomas must answer

Aug 25, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Yesterday, I looked at the possible damage that can harm the credibility of Clive Thomas, given that his formula of a sum of petro dollars for the poorer working classes is stirring up intellectual debate. The reason being, that once Thomas is in the spotlight, it is natural for questions to be put to him about the role of the WPA in the government.
It is because he is the famous activist for over fifty years, that his friends Andaiye, Eusi Kwayana and Moses Bhagwan questioned the way the government went about closing a number of sugar estates putting thousands of families on the breadline. He was the chairman of GuySuCo at the time. Once you hear the name Clive Thomas, you think of the WPA and the long fight for the working people that go back to the era of Walter Rodney.
Let us offer some distant and current background information which puts Clive Thomas again in the spotlight, but this time not about money in the hands of poor people, but deep principles that philosophically should canopy the exercise of power. After the PNC lost five seats in the 2001 elections, its then leader Robert Corbin sought to transform the PNC. The PNC became a constituent of a broad coalition named APNU, of which the WPA was one of its important fulcrums.
The PNC got back in the 2011 elections the five seats it lost. For this analyst and many others, this resuscitation had to do with the symbolism of a PNC-WPA rapprochement. It is the inflexible attitude of this columnist that the WPA and what it symbolized led to the votes APNU got in 2011. The PNC, contesting by itself under Corbin or Granger in 2011, would have had perhaps a more jejune showing than 2001.
In 2015, the PNC came to power under the banner of APNU. Then the WPA ran into trouble and has since been silent – with the graphic exception of Dr. David Hinds – on its invisibility in policy-making. Now with the boldness of Clive Thomas and the WPA in advocating oil money as a cash payment to poor people, it is obligatory on Thomas to discuss its role in the government and what the WPA does in the corridors of power.
The WPA’s troubles began as early as the days after the election results. Rupert Roopnaraine was Minister of Natural Resources designate. In that capacity, he visited a collapsed mine in which a number of diggers died. Then suddenly, he became the Minister of Education. To date, with all the letters its personnel have written in the newspapers since 2015, the WPA leadership has never felt the obligation to explain the sudden change of portfolio for Roopnaraine after May 2015.
It is more than three years since the WPA became part of the government and has a WPA minister in the Cabinet. Questions then must be answered, and Clive Thomas should begin the attempt. To put the first question to Thomas, it is relevant to quote a particular section of the long, official letter by the WPA, in the newspapers this week, confronting Minister Jaipaul Sharma and others who have rejected Thomas’ cash in hand advocacy.
The WPA asserted; “… every WPA policy statement from the birth of our party in 1974, every WPA election manifesto from 1985 and the two manifestos of the APNU and APNU+AFC with which the WPA was integrally involved in crafting our party has long made spending on social programmes central planks of national development”.
If that is so, then the WPA has certainly atrophied, and this is where Thomas has the deep obligation to explain why the WPA is part of a government that does not implement the economic thinking of the WPA which, in that letter, the WPA says goes back to the seventies.
Here are the questions for Thomas that he must answer. He can choose to ignore them, but that doesn’t mean I will not republish them over and over.
Which one of the budgets since 2015 essentially elevated the livelihood of the masses? Which one of those budgets can be classified as being in the essential interests of the masses? Did the WPA’s presence in government agree to the dozens of new taxes that have adversely impacted against working people, including increased tax on animal-drawn vehicles, a ban on vehicles older than 8 years and ban on used tyres, and application of VAT on tuition at private schools?
For all his radical writings of the seventies, are Professor Thomas and the WPA prepared to reject the label of their government as being a neo-liberal one more favourable to big businesses than the masses? More later.

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