APNU+AFC: Complex and not so complex reasons for the untergang

Aug 23, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Over the coming months, I will analyze the 2020 electoral untergang of the APNU+AFC in the 2020 election. It will not be a series. I will just from time to time, pinpoint some of the deciding factors in the defeat.
One cannot point to a cluster of variables to explain the democratic defeat of the PNC and the AFC. There were small factors and there were crucial ones. What happened over the past five years in the APNU+AFC’s tenure was that the small factors and the formidable ones met in a five-year-old confluence and this led to the gradual erosion of voters’ confidence, respect and admiration.
Where to start is a problem. The causes for the election evisceration are oceanic. What I will do is offer specific acts and combine them with broad analytical interpretations as I go along. What I mean is this. I will cite one particular event as a factor in alienating the nation, for example, the immediate salary hike for the leadership after they came to power in 2015. Then I will also look at the theoretical causes for the defeat, for example, the AFC’s complete loss of identity.
I now begin the series which will definitely not be sequential so please do not expect a continuation tomorrow. A caveat is in order. You cannot treat the APNU+AFC as a single entity when you are assessing the untergang. There were specificities and particularities in both the APNU and AFC that existed independent of each party. I hope to highlight these weaknesses in both organizations as I go along.
I start with what I consider the ugliest and nastiest manifestation of degenerate politics I have seen in my 50 years of participating in political activities. Others may not see my example here as containing the depravity I assign to it, but academics put different weight on varying factors.
As I wrote several times in these columns, the decision by the AFC the day of selecting their Cabinet members in May 2015 to offer a complete stranger to politics the Cabinet post of Minister of the Environment, was unheard of anywhere in politics.
For me that was deep, moral turpitude that was destined to destroy the AFC and the government it was part of. From that moment, I had absolutely no more use for the APNU+AFC regime. I made a decision as early as that time that I will use my pen to expose the ethical rut of the APNU+AFC administration. Such people could not be fit to administer the future of Guyana if they could leave their soldiers who struggled in the trenches with them and offer an entire ministry to a personal friend.
The AFC’s continuation in power was marked by a dangerous decline in morality to the point that by 2020, it had lost its raison d’être. I will return to the particularities specific to the AFC that contributed to the electoral demise but let’s go across to the APNU.
One of the amazing scenarios that the five-month election rigging game birthed was the persona of David Hinds. Hinds became, more than any other surrogate, even more than any PNC or AFC leader, the preacher of line of ethnic apocalypse should the PPP be allowed to be declared the winner of the election, a fact that the world accepted.
Hinds mouthed off dangerous rhetoric, the intention of which was to get African Guyanese to create “physical trouble.” It was not hard for anyone to imagine what a young Sydney King did to inflame racial tensions in the 60s when you watched at how Hinds performed for five months.
But Hinds’ defence of ethnic domination the past five months was ironic. His party, APNU, fell in 2020 because he, Hinds, and his fellow WPA inclusions in the APNU+AFC regime, were emasculated after 2015. The bond that the PNC and WPA cemented to contest the 2011 national election brought euphoria to African Guyanese. It dissolved the animosity that existed between Rodneyite Guyanese and Burnhamite Guyanese.
Society’s suspicion began to mount after 2016 that the PNC had used the WPA. This caused two sets of alienation and societal disgust. One was that the middle class Africans who loved Rodney turned away from the Granger presidency. The other was that the very sycophantic behaviour of the WPA alienated Guyanese in general. AFC voters told themselves if the PNC could treat the WPA like that, then what they wouldn’t do to the AFC. AFC voters began to drift back to the PPP. Hinds himself help to generate this alienation and disgust with his critiques of the power intoxication of his own government.
(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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APNU+AFC: Complex and not so complex reasons for the untergang

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