The PPP, PNC and AFC: Which one I prefer?

Feb 08, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Except for Basil Williams and Vincent Alexander, I don’t know the current PNC leadership. Basil and I were students/contemporaries at UG. That was forty years ago.
Since that time Basil and I would chat on a friendly basis. Our chatting became friendlier during the long years of the PNC being in opposition.
Vincent and I were born a block away from our parents’ home in Wortmanville. We get along quite handsomely.
Some of the PPP leaders I know very closely, many of them for decades. I developed a friendship with Anil Nandlall after he became a lawyer. He was one of the brightest students I taught in my 26-year teaching career at UG.
Of the PNC and PPP, and AFC, I would say I was on more personal and personalised terms with many of the AFC’s hierarchical members.
The PPP was in power; now the PNC and AFC are. Because of the nature of my life in Guyana, I am never free of people soliciting my views on the PPP, PNC and AFC.
It can really be annoying but that is the life I chose to live and I try as much as possible to be brief but polite. There are times I just want to be alone with my pet dog and my music on the seawall when a car would pull up: “Freddy, yuh gat a minute?”
I have never been able to sustain an engaged conversations with a majority of these folks because of the circumstances of how we met. But there are times when I am at wedding or a funeral, I would expand. One such occasion was last Saturday night at the birthday of city optometrist, David Singh.
One of the founders of the UK WPA branch, Leyland De Cambra, who was a teenage friend of mine, is in the country. We spent about forty minutes in which time I assessed the dead legacies of Rupert Roopnaraine and Clive Thomas.
I learnt more about the middle class depravities of the WPA that I never knew about. I learnt more about why the commission of inquiry into Walter Rodney’s death was not done earlier because of the attitude of some big wigs in the WPA. I learnt more of the feeling of disgust of Walter’s wife about the betrayal of her heroic husband by certain washed-up WPA personalities.
Always when the question is asked of me about the nature of the PPP, PNC and AFC, I would say in the context of Guyana’s ongoing political tragedies, the AFC is the nastiest and least patriotic of the three parties.
I was tempted to use the adjective, “major” in front the words, “three parties” but I think the AFC is no longer a major party.
I honestly feel in my academic mind that whoever wins the 2020 poll will have a formidable advantage in 2025 and is likely to win reelection then. It means that if the coalition is returned next month, then the AFC will die a natural death. It will completely fade into the shadows of the PNC.
Just as we speak of PPP/C when there is no C; just as we speak of PNC/Reform when there is no Reform, we will speak of APNU+AFC but there will no AFC.
There are a number of disturbing characteristics and political immoralities of the AFC that make them the more unprincipled and less ethical party than the PPP and PNC.
It is virtually impossible to analyse these egregious manifestations in one column much less two or three. In a forthcoming piece, I will release an email exchange between me and then General Secretary, David Patterson, on the AFC offering one of their friends, a complete stranger to politics, the Ministry of the Environment in May 2015.
This immoral abnormality is so shocking that I do not believe there is another example anywhere in modern politics. When that conversation is made public, it is obligatory of our media and citizens to ask the AFC for an explanation.
If that doesn’t happen, I would not be surprised. Don’t forget we are talking about, dystopian, shambolic Guyana. I say from the depths of my psyche that this incident still torments my soul. It is one of the cruelest, sadistic departures I have seen in Guyana in my entire life.
Two of the negatives that I have seen in the post 2015 behaviour of the AFC that I think are less pronounced in the PNC and PPP are the lust for power and middle class snobbery of working class cadres.
In 2016, David Hinds referred to the AFC as power drunk. He was so right. More later.

Discover more from Kaieteur News

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Latest News