Sorry to disappoint you; this is who I am.

Feb 10, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Carlyle Goring, former AFC City Councillor told me I was being criticized by persons who are disappointed in my support for the no-confidence vote (NCV). He said they all want to know why I, of all persons, could support the NCV, given the terrible things the PPP did to me. Carlyle asked if I could explain my reason to him.
My response to Carlyle can now be extended to the dozens of emails I have got from the diaspora expressing strong resentment of my endorsement of the NCV. There is something that bothers me about all these emails of criticism I am getting from persons in the diaspora. All, without exception, are from African Guyanese. I will respond to this dimension of the controversy below, but first my dialogue with Carlyle.
I see the NCV as an opening for a different social construct, a new horizon whose direction would be the opposite to the type of sadistic culture the PPP’s governance embraced. This optimistic formation would have come in the 2020 elections anyway. The PPP’s replacement, APNU+AFC, did not birth the new horizon every Guyanese in and out of Guyana dreamt of after 2015.
My position is pellucid. The new dispensation after 2015 was not a dialectical improvement over the PPP’s destruction. So shocked was I at the continuation of the old style of governance that I saw spaces of morbid governance that exceeded the PPP’s atrophy. I can vividly and graphically cite UG as an example. All those African Guyanese from the diaspora who are emailing me, complaining of how my politics can bring back the PPP, should see some of the secret, silent descriptions of how the administration of UG is worse than when the PPP was in power, and all the complainers are African Guyanese.
I see the NCV as creating dialectical conditions that would curtail the winner-take-all tentacles of the PPP and the PNC. My prediction is that the election results will reflect this encouraging situation. It may not last. It may well frustrate us as the post-2015 dispensation has, but what choice do I have?
I do not want a configuration of power that sees the PPP in power as a majoritarian monster as it has been, or the PNC/AFC as a school of incompetent tyrants I believe they will turn out to be if allowed power for a lengthy period in the future.
Now for a direct reply to those emails from the diaspora. As mentioned above, all, I mean all, are from African Guyanese who admired my pre-2015 activism, but see me as a changed person whose support for the NCV could generate circumstances that could catapult the PPP back into power. All of these emails remind me of what the PPP did to me.
I suspect these folks see politics as a zero sum game between the Indianized PPP and the Africanized PNC. They feel the NCV will bring down an African government and replace it with an Indian regime. I do not see social, sociological and political dynamics in that narrow perspective. I was never like that. I will never be like that.
These email senders want me to support a government I do not think is the solution to my country’s problems. And why do they want me to do this? Because of what the PPP did to me. So in my life, conscience, psyche and choice die because my existence is now based on what the PPP did to me. So I must accept the post-2015 pathway, which is the PPP in another form and shape masquerading as something named APNU+AFC. And I must not recognize and confront this charade, because lurking outside the door is the big and bad PPP that once oppressed me.
This is not how I see my life. My psyche and conscience do not allow me to support the post-2015 arrival, because I think this arrival is truly and simply a coat of varnish in its difference with the PPP. I keep hearing that this new arrival is just three years old. But I see the signs of this new kid in town becoming as corrupt, tyrannical and racist as the Jagdeo/Ramotar cabals were.
The old people I grew up with had a saying that I heard all my years growing up. It goes like this; “you don’t need a light to see what you can see in daylight.” I don’t care which government is Indian and African. I care for my country and those that I love that have to live in it. I want a future for them. The PPP and the APNU+AFC cannot give them that.

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