The PNC: Six successful leaps then a leap into the chasm

Oct 06, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

Kaieteur News – The PNC is the second oldest political party in Guyana and has become a gigantic force in political manoeuvrings since it was born in the fifties. It held state power from 1964 -1992 and again from 2015 to 2020. It is not a small, surviving outfit. It has always chalked up substantial number of votes in free and fair elections with significant numbers of parliamentarians.
Such a historic organization then, over the past sixty years, would naturally come to have an institutionalized rationality that is characteristic of its functionalism. We can identify six periods in the life of the PNC where it moved on large horizons to achieve not only preservation but to continue to expand its authority and presence in Guyana.
Period 1 – The PNC sought a coalition with a third party to create a government to defeat the PPP in the 1964 elections.
Period 2 – Faced with enormous pressure from the West in the 1970s with survival in doubt because of expanding domestic turmoil, the PNC government sought a protective canopy and got it from almost the entire Third World and global, anti-colonial and anti-imperialism bulwarks.
Period 3 – In 1984, President Burnham sought a unity government with Cheddi Jagan’s PPP.
Period 4 – President Hoyte de-Burnhamized his presidency and opened up society and economy to the world.
Period 5 – Faced with declining popularity, the PNC under Robert Corbin subsumed itself under an umbrella named a Partnership for National Unity – APNU – consisting of five other small entities in order to market itself to a changing electorate.
Period 6 – With support for the PPP government declining, the PNC took the gamble and formed an alliance with a formidable third force – the Alliance for Change – to contest the 2015 poll. It paid off. It captured state power.
From 2015 to the present time, Period 6 has seen deep changes in the PNC because of incompetence and corrupt governance and the dramatic defeat in the 2020 election. From March 2020, when its rigging mechanisms failed it, the PNC has become a dysfunctional, dystopian, wandering, wondering organism whose biology makes it almost impossible to understand it.
The latest in its weak physiology is its constant squabbling with its coalition partner, the AFC which has now turned into an inscrutable operation. The operation began with the selection of assignments for the National Assembly. Some logical thinking was born. The PNC argued that it cannot give seats to the constituents of the APNU who did not pull in 7,000 votes in the 2020 election to earn a placement in parliament. Many of the constituents that make up APNU were not awarded MPs, with the WPA snatching one seat.
That was a realpolitik decision that a realist cannot disagree with. If Guyana’s supreme political institution is the election to parliament and government through national voting then why a party that cannot win 1,000 votes be awarded a seat in the House? But right in the middle of this logic emerged a huge illogical signpost. The PNC decided to give nine seats to the AFC.
This has to be jumbie logics for two reasons. How does the PNC know that many in the APNU umbrella did secure 7,000 votes? How did it arrive at one seat for the WPA and nine for the AFC? Secondly, to give the nine MPs seats is to concede that it brought in 63,000 votes which by any standard is a mathematical, statistical and scientific impossibility.
The PNC believed that the impossibility became a reality and the matter was a done deal. The PNC even extended its generosity by attaching an addendum to the renewed Cummingsburg Accord which would give the vice-chairmanship to the Regions that the APNU+AFC won in the regional elections of 2020.
The PNC has withdrawn the addendum. When the AFC enquired, among the reasons given by the PNC leader, David Granger, is that the PNC does not believe that the AFC picked up sufficient votes in 2020 to warrant having the position of vice chairman for Region Four.
This is not only illogical but insane. The votes for the 10 Regions in Guyana which is conducted simultaneously with the national election hardly vary with the results for the national poll. In fact, regional voting is almost identical with choices exercised at the national level.
How then can the PNC award AFC nine parliamentary seats thereby acknowledging it acquired 63,000 votes in the 2020 elections then within weeks turn around and exclaim the AFC did not win enough votes to get a mere vice-chairmanship for a regional democratic council? The PNC has reached an abysmal low in Period 6 of the periodization schema outlined above.

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

---

---