The sickening admission/confession of Raphael Trotman

Dec 14, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – It has been four months since leaders of the PNC and the AFC that ran an undemocratic, corrupt, racially-driven post 2015 dispensation lost power. Since August 2 when these leaders were removed after a prolonged period of election rigging in which many of them stood out as unacceptable humans, they have mysteriously discovered a number of social and political values that were absent when they ruled.
It is virtually an exercise in self-humiliation when dethroned leaders speak of these values. When they meet the public in political meetings, people laugh at them. The first demeaning words to visit them from hecklers, go like this: “So why you didn’t practice these things when you were in power?”
Raphael Trotman published a letter in this newspaper that should be a goldmine for scholars who study Guyanese politics. He literally admitted or confessed that the AFC was a non-existent factor in the five years of APNU+AFC rule. Throughout the letter, he describes politics as a contest between the PNC and PPP and each time one or the other gets into office, one half of the population rejects them.
It is interesting to offer some quotes from his commentary that underscore his revelation: 1-”One government or one party alone cannot effectively rule Guyana. Other groups will feel ostracized and left out.”; 2- “We are a people comprising several nations living in a geographic space we call Guyana. Those of us living here know that at any given one or two of those nations will not like another, accept another or give the other the legitimacy it needs.”; 3- “The PNC discovered this from 1966 to 1992 and 2015 to 2020. The PPP discovered this from 1992 to 2015.”; 4- “What it comes down to is that almost half of the population will not accept you.”; 5- “It is well known that the major parties have always regarded each other with great distrust…”
The five quotes above when analyzed reveal: (1) the extremely troubling nature of the AFC; (2) The pathetic failure of the AFC to be an agent of change; (3) The use of power by the AFC for power’s sake; (4) The acceptance of the AFC that it is part of the political binary – PPP and PNC; (5) The AFC was deceiving Guyanese for the five years when in power.
So the questions naturally follow. If politics has been a zero sum game between the PNC and PPP, why was there no dialectical intervention to negate this persistent culture when the AFC secured almost half the government in 2015?
Here was a multi-racial party whose essential support cut across the race divide. Here was a multi-racial party whose rising multi-racial capital was eating into both the PPP and PNC. Here was a multi-racial party that secured seven ministries comprising some of the most important Cabinet portfolios including the prime minister position. Against these staggering facts, Trotman describes governance in Guyana as alternating system between the PPP and PNC in which both satisfy their own constituencies and rule against one half of the country.
The curiosity that lies deeply in Trotman’s adumbration is what the mental state of the AFC was when it was in power. Was there a resignation of the AFC’s leadership that no third force can unloose the tight grip, which the two Leviathans have on the Guyanese people and therefore there was no attempt confront the PNC in policy-making?
What about the theory that there was no concern by the AFC to stamp the third party’s imprint on governance and power was pursued for power’s sake and thus the AFC just became jejune, ordinary and simply opportunistic. Perhaps the key code in Trotman’s letter that must be decoded is his preference for one of the racial Leviathan over the other, thus effectively merging the PNC and the AFC. It means therefore that this is acceptance by Trotman that the AFC no longer wants to sandwich itself between the two racial contestants in order to dilute racial consciousness in Guyana.
Trotman’s letter has been the most extraordinary revelation since the AFC merged with the PNC to contest the 2015 election that the AFC was not a third force when it had power and that in the configuration of the ethnic lines, the AFC has chosen a side. Trotman’s missive in the newspaper will long be cited as evidence that the AFC was the greatest deceiver in Guyanese politics long before Independence. The first political party was born in 1926, and it is my contestation that the AFC will long be remembered as the most unprincipled entity that ever participated in politics in the history of this country.

(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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