What you wish for others may turn against you!

May 06, 2020 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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When people are unwilling to accept the truth about themselves, they resort to blaming others. Finding a scapegoat for our own flaws and faults, is one way of refusing to take responsibility for our own failings.
In 1992, the PNC lost the first free and fair elections in more than 24 years. The supporters of the PNCR knew that their party had lost the elections. But some of the supporters did not wish to accept responsibility for its own failures and so it sought a scapegoat.
It made former US President Jimmy Carter the scapegoat. The disaffected within the PNC camp claimed that it was former US President Jimmy Carter who came here and rigged the elections. This was a big lie and the people who were peddling it knew it was a massive concoction but in their desperation, they hung on to it in order to excuse the mistakes of their leaders.
In 1997 elections, Desmond Hoyte felt humiliated that he had lost to a woman, Janet Jagan. Therefore, his supporters made her the scapegoat. This time, it was said that she had no right being President of Guyana. She was made the scapegoat, and in the most racist of ways.
Some of the supporters of the PNC decided to ‘wuk pon she’. They would hold up a white doll, throw it to the ground and beat and stamp upon it.
There was an interesting and tragic end to that matter. One of the women who used to be beating and stamping on the doll ended up in an abusive relationship. Almost every day, so the story goes, she ended up being beaten and stamped upon by her partner. So careful what you wish on others; it may turn against you.
After the 2015 elections, the PPPC supporters found a scapegoat for their party’s own failures. They claimed that the ABC countries instigated the PPP’s fall from power. They were unwilling to confront the realities that they neglected their base.
The APNU+AFC supporters are now trying to find their own scapegoats. They are blaming ‘left, right and center’ without accepting any culpability for their electoral loss.
They are blaming Russian hacking even though we have a manual election system; they tried to blame the foreign observers, going to the extent of threatening to rescind their accreditation. The APNU+AFC lackeys are now claiming foreign interference; and in their latest act of malevolence, they are now taking out their frustration on the Carter Center.
Everybody else is being blamed but those who ultimately contributed to the loss. The APNU+AFC is refusing to accept that their actions in government contributed to their defeat in 2020. These actions included the scandalous Sussex Street bond rental, the 50% increases in salaries to Ministers, the sell-out of the country’s oil resources, the public displays of arrogance by government Ministers, the dismissal of more than 5,000 sugar workers, the favouring of friends and cronies for jobs and the seizure of lands from citizens.
The Coalition did not take steps to address its numerous shortcomings and the reasons for the two consecutive defeats, to the PPPC, in local government elections. Instead of consolidating after its local government defeats, the APNU picked a fight with the AFC.
You would have thought the experience of the 2018 loss to the PPP would have made both the APNU and the AFC keen to reduce the schisms within the Coalition. Instead, these divisions widened.
The AFC was forced to issue an ultimatum to the APNU. Even then, there was a reluctance to announce Khemraj Ramjattan as the Prime Ministerial candidate during the campaign.
It was a suicidal political strategy given the fact that no ethnic group now has the numbers to win a free and fair election outright. The Indian vote alone cannot deliver an election to the PPPC and the African vote cannot deliver a victory for the APNU.
In the end, the mistakes of the Coalition cost it the elections. The emasculation of the AFC meant that that party lost its appeal to voters. This was principally responsible for the Coalition’s loss. But instead of admitting this, the Coalition is looking for scapegoats to justify its brazen attempt to steal the elections.
But right now, the leaders of the losers of the 2020 elections are not looking to their parties’ future. They are more interested in their own personal future and that of their businessmen friends who have been able to gain prime real estate at dog-cheap prices.
The scapegoating will continue and it will attract the usual band of merry men and merry women who prefer to see Guyana go down the drain than admit to their leaders’ mistakes.

(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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