50 shades of David Hinds

May 13, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

My good friend, David Hinds has introduced a plethora of dimensions into the discussions on the election impasse. Response to his letter on me in yesterday’s Kaieteur News, would take several columns to polemicize on the dimensions.
Here is a brief enumeration. (1)- The West has its reasons for choosing the PPP over the PNC. (2) CARICOM leaders are not coming from the same ideological base as the West. (3) There is a disputed election not a rigged election. (4) African Guyanese have a historical narrative and a historical trauma different from ethnic groups thus they do not see the election as a solution to Guyana’s endemic troubles. (5)- Which context you use determine how you arrive at what the election impose is about. (6) – Elections do not in themselves solve a country’s problems. (7) – The 2020 election should be scrapped and install an interim government. (8) Granger should lead the interim government. (9) Criticism of Eusi Kwayana’s positive position on Claudette Singh is equated with going after Kwayana.
With due respect, each of these postulations are not just bad arguments but each has profound analytical flaws all of which are misleading, subjective, unscientific and unacceptable. I will visit these 50 shades of my friend from time to time but for now I will select one shade only – what election means to David Hinds.
A preface to my main point is in order. Many anti-Hinds critics have missed a motif in David’s consistent adumbrations – he has never written that the APNU+AFC won the election. There are virtual clowns and racists in this country that have barefacedly argue that GECOM has made a declaration and it should be declared as legal and final.
After what Mingo did, no one in this country should have even half a modicum of relationship with such depraved minds. What Mingo did was an open violation of moral codes, legal rules and human conscience. If science still governs life, then the scientific evidence is graphic. What Mingo put into his declaration is not in the boxes in the recount. It takes the ugliest of minds after the recount to support Lowenfield’s finality. Much to his credit, David has not accepted the GECOM document on the election results.
In forthcoming pieces, I will examine more shades but this one looks directly at the role of David in the 2020 election campaign. I did not participate in the 2020 campaign because, like David, I believe in shared governance. I wanted to see a brake put on the jurisdiction on the PNC or PPP. I saw that padlock as coming from the assignment of parliamentary seats to the smaller parties. I voted for Lenox Shuman.
David’s position for decades is that Guyana needs shared governance to eradicate ethnic insecurities. But David supported one of those race groups, joined its party, became a candidate and campaigned for the victory of that race. I know absolutely that David’s party lost.
How are you going to convince decent, independent minds that your advocacy of scrapping the election and having ethnic representation in the exercise of power is because your party which exemplifies ethnic expressions lost the battle? If the PNC had won, then David was partly responsible for widening the race chasm because he campaigned for ethnic domination. I did not. I chose the Amerindian party which to my mind is a choice that has more historicity than David’s position.
The question of existential action comes in here. Why did David not walk away from ethnic politics and struggle for power-sharing? If Guyana is sharply bifurcated along ethnic lines with each race group putting their fate in the hands of a party that they want to see dominate Guyana, then how can your participation in a victory for one side over the other square with your ideological doctrine of power-sharing as a solution to the intractable dilemma of ethnic insecurities?
Of course, the other side is not going to be convinced by David’s exclamation of “eureka” which is pronounced in all his newspaper letters and columns. They will ask that if his discovery that elections have a harmful value and expose the fault lines of Guyana is not because his party ANPU lost?
Personally, I am disappointed that someone like David, who is a Rodneyite, did not see the value of rooting for one of the smaller parties. That makes sense for people who feel that the power of the PNC as a government by itself and the power of the administration of the PPP by itself have to be tamed if we are going to get good governance. David why did you join one of the two ethnic monsters?

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

---

---