Bolivia and Guyana: Oh the stupidity of humans!

Apr 07, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – The PPP made a stunning comeback in the March 2020 election. Seven months after this achievement in Guyana, it was repeated in Bolivia. The Movement Toward Socialism lost power when the military, in October 2019, pressured President, Evo Morales to resign.
An interim government was installed, whose leader from the Senate ruled for a year then decided to contest the October 2020 election along with several right-wing parties. They lost. Why? Because for the year they administered Bolivia, they refused to learn the lessons that hundreds of years have given the people of the 21st century.
When in power, when you criticise the leaders you removed, you have to rule in the opposite way. You have to distance yourself from the raggedness, corruptibility, mistreatment of the poorer classes, arrogance, incompetent management, etc., of the previous administration. If you do not do that, the electorate will come to hate you and would be eager to remove you.
Before we discuss Guyana, I keep referring to the election of the left-wing party of Greece, Syriza. It came to power in 2015 during severe austerity measures imposed by the European Central Bank as a requirement for debt relief. Its rejection of the harsh impositions made it very popular among the Greek people who voted it into power.
Then Syriza’s Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, did one of the most idiotic things any politician from any age could have done. The very austerity impositions he denounced when in opposition, he accepted and implemented in even more severe ways. Tsipras had to be the biggest fool in the world to think he would be re-elected. The obvious picture of him in front of the eyes of the voter was that of a deceiver. If you promise citizens to reduce the working hours and when you come to power and you didn’t do it, they may forget the promise. But they will hate you when do the opposite, that is, extended the working hours.
So we have Greece, Guyana, Bolivia and there will be hundreds more like them in competitive elections in the future, the reason being people refuse to learn from the graphic mistakes that reside in history. In Guyana, the March 2020 election drama will not fade away because the Guyanese people have internalised a strong historical lesson.
In the 21st century, with the ubiquity of social media, the faults and sins of all governments will be intensely discussed; no country is exempted. This is what happened to the APNU+AFC, 2015-2019. Its broken promises, corruptibility, power drunkenness, anti-working class insensitivities, mediocre performance, distant leadership and insipidity of its presidential outlay enraged the voters who expected so much after 23 years of PPP domination.
The thing that Guyana, Bolivia and Greece have in common is their former ruling parties face a dismal future. The Movement Toward Socialism is unlikely to be defeated by a disjointed conservative movement. Syriza’s success was born in unique circumstances that will not be repeated in the distant future in Greece.
In Guyana, the worst case scenario is present. The AFC’s death is a scientific fact; though they say never apply science to human behaviour. What could happen is that one of the smaller parties can slowly develop to attract the type of voters that gravitated to the AFC between 2002 and 2014. But that is way down into the future.
The PNC is going to continue to be a weakened party. It recovered from the Corbin years because people saw the new leadership plus its alliance with the WPA as the birth of a different PNC. The self-destruction of the PNC from March to the present time makes it difficult to regain its historical strength.
It is impossible for the PNC to gain power in the coming decades. First, it does not have numbers to ever win an election. Secondly, no smaller party is going to touch the PNC even with a 10 feet pole. One can say with definitiveness that the future of the PNC is uncertain.
The vacuum is worrying because no matter how electorally popular the PPP will remain, no matter how generous the PPP will be with oil revenues, no matter how deep will be the lessons, the PPP would have learnt from its 23 years in power, transparency, accountability, good governance and democracy will always be preserved even in diluted forms once a country has an energetic, vibrant and competent opposition. I guess it would be best to say that a party named the AFC and an entity named the ANPU was a moment that may never come again.

(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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