A crucial point Donald Rodney missed on the PNC-WPA union

Nov 27, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

In the Donald Rodney vigil last Thursday outside the Court of Appeal, a little but serious disagreement broke out between Donald and Tacuma Ogunseye. I didn’t think it was proper for me to get involved at the time. What I would have said, had I intervened, is contained below.
Donald was not in agreement with the WPA merging with PNC. He didn’t directly accuse WPA cadres like Ogunseye of betraying Walter Rodney, but his feeling was there to see. Ogunseye replied and stressed two words; “objective conditions”. Once you hear a politician or political activist use those two words, you know they are referring to dialectics.
Ogunseye explained that in 2010, the objective conditions existed for the PNC and WPA to work along for a peaceful solution to Guyana’s intractable ethnic and political problems, especially given the deep, authoritarian instincts that the PPP leadership was showing in the use of power.
The argument got disrupted several times through the approach of the media and others joining the vigil. When I left the gathering, I didn’t hear Donald using the dialectical criterion to show Ogunseye that the objective conditions for the PNC and WPA working together no longer existed in 2016 onwards.
Here now is my take that I would have injected if the polemic had continued. I did not have comfortable feelings at the insertion of the WPA into APNU, with the PNC being the real powerhouse in 2011. Likewise, I did not feel comfortable with the AFC merging with the PNC in 2015. On both occasions I was not publicly critical, and eventually accepted the attitude of both parties. I cannot honestly say that I disapproved of what the WPA and AFC did.
My rejection of the WPA and AFC as decent, independent, nationalist, democratic, multi-racial organizations came after I saw them as actors with state power. I have spent my entire life, first as a student of power, then as a qualified academic studying it. You judge the essential being of an organization and an individual by how they use power. This column doesn’t relate to the AFC, so I will omit it from further discussion.
The objective conditions for the WPA remaining with the PNC in an alliance were no longer there after 2015. This is what Donald should have told Ogunseye. The alliance was born at a time when the PPP government had gone in extreme authoritarian directions, and the PNC itself under Robert Corbin was experiencing bad vibes from both its supporters and the nation as a whole. The most compelling evidence of this was the loss of five seats in the 2006 general elections.
Corbin himself was open to the PNC going in new directions. He saw a cooperative venture with the WPA as a process that could change the nature of politics in Guyana and the image of the PNC itself.
Corbin entered talks with the WPA as someone who genuinely felt that the dispute within the African community, driven by the bifurcation of Rodneyite and Burnhamite cultures, should be ended. APNU was the result. APNU was intended to be the new direction of the PNC, without any future hegemonic tendencies of the PNC.
This entire face of politics had changed after power was acquired. A number of factors explain the new situation. Jean Paul Sartre says man makes the dialectic just as the dialectic makes him. First, Corbin’s influence in the PNC and government had gone, so that moderating influence was no longer there.
Secondly, the new PNC leader, David Granger, was a Burnhamite ideologue, Corbin was not. Thirdly, Granger, as a very senior officer in the army’s hierarchy at the time Rodney was engaged in action against the Burnham government, would have had extensive knowledge of many of the secret activities of the WPA.
I suspect there is still a haunting resentment of what the WPA did to Burnham.
Fourthly, the entire landscape of the Corbin-WPA-Third Force environment of 2010 was gone after 2015. A different PNC, under new leadership both from within and outside of Guyana, was in power. They knew nothing about the 2010 dialogue between Corbin and the WPA, and they didn’t care to know. That different PNC leadership, especially Ganger, had no interest in a PNC-WPA reconciliation. In fact, during the 2015 campaign Granger interfaced with the AFC. The WPA’s presence in the 2015 campaign was virtually invisible. The only high -level WPA presence in the PNC’s command centre in Queenstown in 2015 was Jocelyn Dow, who was always close to the PNC since the seventies. After 2015, the WPA’s role had come to an end.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)

---

---