Latest update November 26th, 2024 1:00 AM
New situation in the PNC’s choice of PM candidate
The anticipation is that the recent retired head of the army, Brigadier Mark Philips, will be the PPP’s PM candidate in the upcoming general election. Across the divide, the sea is not tranquil. The PNC’s war room has to decide on Nagamootoo or Ramjattan.
Freddie Kissoon
The PNC is facing a crushing headache. It has made up its mind that the symbolic value of a PNC partnership with the AFC is a requirement for the election and that is a sealed position. The question facing the PNC is what shape the arrangement must take since 2015 dialectics are not the same in 2019.
Anyone who argues that the AFC in 2011 and 2015 is the original AFC with the same impressive credentials and the third force, multi-racial value it possessed in those years needs to be dragged to the madhouse for treatment.
That there will be a PNC-AFC election arrangement is foregone conclusion but no one, even inside the leadership of the PNC, knows who will be the PM candidate. The consensus in the PNC is not for Ramjattan.
But the PNC cannot take Nagamootoo because AFC leaders are inflexible – in the 2015 covenant with the PNC, the latter must assign the PM slot to the AFC and the AFC had made its recommendation. It has selected Ramjattan.
This situation is creating hard reflections inside the PNC and there seems to be emerging two configurations. The PNC knowing that it cannot take Nagamootoo because the resulting animosity it will create inside the AFC and having made up its mind on Ramjattan, has come up with a road map.
This columnist has been informed that the PNC is studying two formats. Go with a woman, though not African but not necessarily East Indian. The choice seems to be an Amerindian person. This has not been settled because some PNC strategists feel the convention of selecting an East Indian should be maintained because it is the ethnic reality in Guyana.
The second configuration is to go with an Indian, without gender being the crucial factor, from either the diaspora, civil society in Guyana, or inside the PNC itself. As it stands at the moment, it looks like one of those two roads will be taken.
If the PNC-AFC wins in 2019, there will be no Nagamootoo or Ramjattan as the prime minister.
But there is a colossal ‘but’. What happens if the AFC insists that it must make the PM nomination? I have been reliably informed that this could be a third pathway but the PNC has said to the AFC that the person must not be African Guyanese because the PNC prefers the multi-racial blueprint – African president/ non- African prime minister.
The PNC hierarchy is inflexible that the AFC just cannot give them a name. It must be someone the PNC trusts implicitly.
There are no such names in the AFC. One of the dilemmas facing the PNC is that if it wins power, its leader is getting on in age and has an illness even though the malady is under control. But with such a medical problem no doctor can guarantee strict eradication over the long years.
The PNC therefore will need to make sure that the PM candidate will agree in earnest to do a Sam Hinds if President Granger retires while in office.
The exacerbating factor is that the AFC cannot meet the criteria of the PNC. The AFC is a spent force that does not have credible faces that the Guyanese people will embrace. Where are the AFC selectees going to come from?
Given the empty barrel of the AFC, Guyana is likely to see a PM candidate for the APNU+AFC ticket that is not from the AFC.
This will be a fait accompli that the AFC will have to accept. For all its boasting about what the Cummingsburg Accord spells out, the AFC knows that its bargaining power has been substantially diminished.
I spoke with one big wig in the PNC who is strategically placed. He spoke these words to me; “Freddie run with this; the PNC is not going with no dead 2015 Cummingsburg Accord; you mean some other accord. You write that Freddie, I telling you that is a done deal.”
So I am running with it. I am writing what a very important PNC leader told me – the 2015 pact between the PNC and the AFC known as the Cummingsburg Accord will not be the defining document between the two entities for the upcoming election. Remember this article when that happens.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)
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