Political unity is a smokescreen

Mar 12, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – It is about time we disabuse ourselves of this nonsense about the need for all the political parties to come together to work for the betterment of the country. If that is what is called political unity, then the country is destined for disaster.
Guyanese have had a taste of the country’s three main political parties. The PNC/R, the PPP and the AFC have all failed this country. And if you put them together, they will end up destroying Guyana because they are intellectually bankrupt.
The PNC, PPP and the AFC have all failed. They lack the intellectual mettle which is needed to successfully govern. They think they possess the know-how but they do not know how little they know.
Imagine what happens when you put the hopeless leadership of these three main parties within the same government. What we will have is a government which knows little about how little it knows.
Bringing the parties together will simply transfer the present political conflicts to inside the government. It will result in an unstable government, constantly in gridlock and warring within.
Corruption will become further institutionalized. Instead of brokering compromises – which everyone hopes will happen – it will end up leading to trade-offs. Power sharing will simply allow these three parties to divide the spoils of government among themselves. And the people of Guyana will be worse off since the spoils will have to be split three ways.
The rationale for power sharing in Guyana has nothing to do with political competence. The raison d’être of power sharing or shared governance is ethnic security. And right now the ethnic security dilemma bubble has burst.
The ethnic security dilemma was based on the idea that one party holds a perpetual stranglehold on power so long as ethnic voting takes place. No one ethnic group commands the numbers to win a majority in an election. The PNC was able to combine with the AFC to oust the PPP in 2015. Therefore the ethnic security dilemma, as originally contemplated can no longer be used to advance claims for power sharing.
What can be argued is that people want to be ruled by their own. But if this is indeed the case, it makes a case against power sharing rather than for power sharing.
The Guyanese people have been brainwashed into believing that the ‘other’ is the enemy. They have also been indoctrinated into believing some idealistic notion that if the two main parties come together that would be the solution to our problem. But this is just a theoretically desirable position. None of the two main political parties have demonstrated the tendency to want to share power; if anything they want to hog political power.
What Guyana needs is not for the parties to come together. That is a recipe for trouble. Every country needs an Opposition. When you don’t have an Opposition, you are pawning your future to those who wield political authority. So there is need for a government and an Opposition, not for the government and the Opposition to be one and the same.
The AFC became the footstool of the PNC, one of the larger parties. The AFC because of the greed for political power ended up becoming the victim of the very thing which they were formed to counter.
The problem with Guyana is ideological. There is no longer any genuine working class party. And so the working class will suffer because all three of the country’s main political parties are in bed with the propertied class. The persons who benefitted the most from land deals under all government are not the poor people. It is rich people who are benefitting from the land deals and from the tax and other concessions offered by government. The country’s three main political parties are all proxies for the propertied class.
They would have you believe in trickledown economics. They preach the mantra that when the private businesses do well jobs are created for the poor. But who takes the hog share of the country’s wealth.
A few days ago, a property was advertised for sale in the newspapers. The owner was calling $160M. Which poor man can ever dream about owning a property of that value?
Which poor man can ever dream, at present, of buying a property in Georgetown? The rich people are gobbling up all the residential properties in the city and somehow are getting approval to establish businesses even in areas which are zoned as residential.
A feature of Guyanese politics has been deception. The main political parties pretend to be interested in the working class but it is the rich who get richer under their rule. When both the PNC were in power, a small group of rich people did well. And while they were milking the national cow, the Guyanese people were lining up under the PNC for basic food items. Did you ever see a rich person in any line? They have other “lines” which they use to avoid the lines!
Political unity is a smokescreen. It will allow for the perpetuation of a system in which the rich get richer and the gap between the poor and the rich widens.
Political unity is a smokescreen. It allows the working class to blame the main political parties for the country’s problems. This serves to divide the people and allows for a system which continues to discriminate in favour of the rich.
The Guyanese people need to rid themselves of this idea that political unity will solve our problems; it will compound them. What Guyana needs is ideological rule in which the poor and powerless become prosperous and powerful. What Guyana needs is a working class government not neo-liberal parties masquerading as working class parties.
The PPP, the PNC or the AFC are all of the same ideological ilk. They are pretenders at being working class parties. A genuine working class party is needed, one that will have to be prepared to ditch the favours which are granted to the rich – the friends of the PPP, PNC and AFC.

(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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