The AFC faces its final curtain

Mar 19, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – Do not believe for one bit that the raft of resignations, which are taking place within the Alliance For Change (AFC), is part of a natural attrition process! Do not for one second think that these resignations will not affect the future of that party.
The AFC is imploding. These resignations are denuding the AFC of the critical second level leadership, the very leadership that will have to assume responsibility for the party’s future.
In other words, the party’s future appears bleak. Its reserves are dwindling and those cadres who were supposed to be part of the political succession of the AFC will not be around by the time the next elections are due.
A political vacuum is being created within the AFC. In addition, unless the leadership arrests the present haemorrhaging of its membership, the AFC will become a more bare-bones party than the Working People’s Alliance.
Those who are resigning have seen the writing on the wall. They know that the AFC will never see political power again, at least not after that disgraceful performance between March and August last year. Those leaving know the truth: the AFC instead of standing on principle attached itself to a dishonest scheme to discredit the results of the elections after initially having its supporters believe that it had won the elections.
The senior leadership of the AFC has lost credibility. Moreover, it is they who really should be stepping aside and making room for the second-tier leadership to assume command. Instead, they are determined to stay on in the party and the National Assembly, despite the view that with them in place, the AFC has become unelectable.
Despite this, it is not likely that the recent spate of resignations has anything to do with frustration over succession within the AFC. No, the writing is clear: people want to move on with their lives and they know that the AFC stands little chance of ever wielding the sort of political influence it did in 2011. As such, people are moving forward with their lives.
But this is not the full story. Do not for one moment believe that the hidden hand of the PPP/C is not complicit in some of the resignations. The PPP/C knows that once it breaks the AFC, nothing will stand in its way to remain in office for a long, long time.
As part of its electoral strategy, the PPP/C has long targeted the AFC. And now that the AFC has self-inflicted wounds, the PPP/C is going to deliver the coup de grâce.
The PPP/C knows that it lost votes since 2006 to the AFC and that it was the AFC, which was responsible for the PPP/C having a minority government in 2011. The PPP/C knows that in any head-to-head contest with the PNC/R, it will whip that party handily. As such, it has set itself the task of weakening the AFC.
But it has also been the tradition of the PPP/C to go after parties, which threaten its support base. And in 2011, the AFC made serious in-roads into the PPP/C’s support base, mainly on account of groundwork done by former members of Ravi Dev’s party, ROAR, on behalf of the AFC.
The PPP/C clawed back that support in 2015. The AFC allowed itself to become a political doormat of the APNU and persons who voted for them were disgusted and refused to give them their votes in 2020.
A few nights ago, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, who is also General Secretary of the PPP, appeared on GLOBESPAN programme with former head of the Democratic Labour Movement (DLM), Paul Nehru Tennassee. When Tennassee established his political party, the PPP/C, then under Cheddi Jagan, went after him with a fury.
They had labelled his party as being a CIA outfit and set loose their thugs on him and his political activists. Even though in those days, elections were consistently rigged by the PNC, the PPP/C did not broker any incursions into its power base.
Ironically, in the run-up to the 192 elections, Jagan, as a compromise, eventually agreed to a proposal, which would see him being the Presidential candidate with Tennassee and Clive Thomas as Vice Presidents. The GUARD Movement and the WPA then vetoed that proposal.
So while much of what is taking place within the AFC is of its own making, the PPP/C is also working behind the scenes to destroy the AFC. By the time, the next elections arrive, the AFC will be to the APNU what the WPA is today, a mere political token.

(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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