Cardboard Coalition

Aug 16, 2020 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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David Granger needed no Moses to write his 10 commandments. With his tablet of 10 guidelines, Granger has now effectively dissolved the APNU, leaving only the PNC/R and the AFC as constituent members of the Coalition.
During a radio interview, the Leader of the PNC/R who is also the representative of the Coalition’s List said he didn’t want fake or ‘cardboard, “Not fake parties, not cardboard parties. He said that parliamentarians must belong to active parties with constitutions, with members and with conferences. The 10th commandment requires that parliamentarians must belong to active political parties
The APNU consists of the PNC/R and four other small and insignificant parties – the Justice for All Party, the Guyana Action Party, the National Democratic Front, and Working People’s Alliance. Even if these Lilliputians can lay claim to having constitutions and members and can establish that they engage in political activity, they will find it difficult to prove that they have held members’ conferences and congresses. These parties for all intents and purposes meet Granger’s criterion of cardboard parties.
The 10th commandment sounds the death-knell of the APNU. Apart from the PNC/R, all of the other parties are cardboard parties. They are therefore effectively disqualified from being represented in the National Assembly.
With one lift of his tablet of commandments, David Granger has dissolved the APNU. The PNC/R and the AFC will be the only two parties represented in the National Assembly.
The AFC had already agreed to be emasculated. It was forced to agree to a reduction of its representation in parliament from 40% to 30%. The Coalition won 31 seats. Thirty (30) per cent of this is 9.3.
Using the logic of the APNU’s, in its challenges to the no-confidence motion, there is no one-third man. Therefore, the 9.3 has to be rounded off to 10.
The AFC will qualify for 10 seats. The PNC/R will gobble up the other 21. By virtue of the 10th commandment, the Working People’s Alliance, Keith Scott’s National Democratic Front, Sydney Allicock’s Guyana Action Party and C. N. Sharma’s Justice for All Party, will not be represented in parliament.
It was inevitable that the PNC/R would dissolve the APNU. David Granger had a singular mission as President and Leader of the PNC/R. That mission was to renovate Burnham’s legacy. Everything that he has done since 2011 came straight out of Burnham’s notebook.
In the run-up to the 1968 elections, Forbes Burnham pledged that never again would the PNC enter into a Coalition government. The PNC/R gained office in 2015 by virtue of a coalition but immediately began to emasculate the other Coalition parties.
This policy was so conspicuous that David Hinds of the Working People’s Alliance demanded that the Coalition government apologize to its supporters. He related how the APNU was not meeting and bemoaned the lack of opportunities for the WPA to make an input into the decision-making of the APNU. In response, he was dismissed as a columnist in the state-owned Guyana Chronicle.
The WPA is a cardboard party like all the other small parties of the APNU. They were window-dressing for the PNC/R. And now that power is gone, the window-dressing has to be taken down.
The PNC/R was never comfortable with the 40% of seats, which it had to assign to the AFC. It was never comfortable with the token representation it had to concede to the small parties represented in the APNU. It is now creating a new Coalition with only the AFC. With the PNC/R controlling the list, it will eventually dump the AFC and thus realized Burnham’s complete rejection of the coalitions.
Coalition politics has become the first major casualty of the loss of the March 2020 elections. Small parties will now find it difficult to piggyback on much larger parties. The WPA which has become a specialist at piggybacking – as it did when it forged alliances with Paul Hardy’s Guyana Action Party – will not survive.
The WPA has not had a Members’ Conference in decades. The party is devoid of any significant constituency. Even if it formally becomes an ethnic party, it will find that the Guyanese people have little appetite for its rank opportunism and dishonesty.
The WPA and all the other smaller parties of the APNU were prepared to remain silent about, to condone or be complicit in the rigging of the elections’ results. They will soon be receiving notice that they will not be represented in parliament.
The APNU was always a ‘fake’ coalition, made up of paper parties and political stragglers. The 10th commandment brings an end to that inglorious chapter of cardboard coalitions.

(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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