Why did the PPP win the 2018 LGE?

Dec 03, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Since the 2018 LGE results, the talk has been constant – people don’t vote at such elections. But the academics will tell you that there is crucial information in those election results that is worth pondering on.
Let’s take the attitude of the PNC and AFC. Many of the leaders have advised supporters not to be unduly worried because the low turnout is not an indication of how things will play out in the national elections.
That is misleading. Even with a low turnout, there are factors in the results that are important to note. A very simple example should drive home the point. If in a village of 100,000 voters, three parties contested and 300 votes went to one; 200 ballots for another and 10 for another, then the party that got ten, lost badly. That party’s justification for its showing of ten votes by pointing to the small number of voters that went to the polling stations cannot hold water.
At the end of the day, it showed that out of 510 votes, two of your competitors beat you badly. You have to ask yourself why you didn’t get the 300 ballots one competitor received instead of the paltry 10 votes.
Whatever excuses the PNC and AFC want to use, the incontrovertible fact is that based on GECOM’s publication, the PPP won the 2018 LGE by a large margin – 61 percent. How does the analyst explain this status of the PPP when just three and a half years ago it lost power, power that it held under Messrs Jagdeo and Ramotar who abused it in naked ways and through such sordid usage, it should have been devastated at the LGE elections?
The PPP did not win the 2018 LGE. The AFC and PNC lost it. The PPP reaped the outcome of deep emotional scars the performance of the APNU+AFC left in a substantial number of citizens. I am one of those citizens and I admit to readers that I should be counted in that category.
Since the government consisted of two parties – APNU and AFC – it will be methodologically useful to cite the different attitudes on PNC and AFC leaders that impacted on people’s emotions.
I would think the AFC’s 42 months in office drove the frustration of citizens deeper than the PNC tenure. Voters had a greater expectation from the AFC than APNU and it has to do with race, freedom and justice. The Guyanese people have long accepted that the PPP and PNC aren’t going anyway so they have to live with them. They shrug their shoulders and say, “same old PPP, same old PNC.”
But the AFC appeared different in their eyes. For them, this was a chance of a new Guyana, with new faces (despite Nagamootoo’s presence). The AFC for its supporters wasn’t an Indian outfit or an African entity. Tired and burdened with the ethnocentricity of the two traditional leviathans, people saw the AFC as the start of new politics, a discourse without race, a discourse about changing Guyana.
When the AFC announced that it would be dead meat if it joined up with the two troglodytes, that further heightened the instinct of expectation. But the AFC did just that. It teamed up with the PNC. But even though that disappointed many, the defeat of the PPP was welcomed because the new kid on the block had an opportunity now to bring those changes that were longed for at the birth of the AFC.
It was not to be. For reasons that are contained in almost fifteen previous commentaries, the AFC appeared in the eyes of a huge number of citizens to have subsumed its identity under the PNC. As the days moved into months, as the years moved on, the AFC wasn’t coming across as the game-changer people saw it to be when it was born in 2006.
But even more than that, the AFC was looking like a player more arrogant, more undemocratic, more driven by power than its older, bigger partner, the PNC.
AFC leaders in power would say and do things that people found shocking. In a population that lived with the Carter formula for over two decades, it was the two big AFC leaders (Trotman and Ramjattan) who informed the President that he could make a unilateral appointment of a chairman.
Two Guyanese icons were removed from writing for the Chronicle and they both accused the Prime Minister as the person who made the demand, an accusation that he has not denied to date. Ramjattan openly called for draconian language in the Cyber Crime Bill.
By the time the 2018 LGE came, Guyanese were extremely bitter with the AFC. The rest is history.

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Why did the PPP win the 2018 LGE?

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