The stupidest yet deadliest person alive is the party sycophant

May 17, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – Do you know how many PPP, PNC, WPA and AFC leaders could have changed directions and become loved ones across cultural, religious and race lines if only the second tier leaders in those parties had shown conscience, obligation, morality and courage and tell them they were wrong and they must behave differently.
I have spent over 50 years in political, social and human rights activism and I saw these tragic inevitabilities that have devastated Guyana and destroyed the legacies of these leaders. Comparatively in the context of the age of the present generation, I am in advanced age, and I will grow older and die and never understand the role of a party sycophant.
Why a human set out with others to change their country and the world for the betterment of their fellow humans and refuses to open their mouths to say the following words, “Don’t do it, it is not right and it will harm the party and the country.”
But here is the thing. Do it and if you do not succeed then leave but do not seek to change the world for the better by being a silent slave. In those 50 years, I have seen many things that if they had become reality Guyana’s history would have been the opposite from what it is today.
As an academic, I believe from my studies of politics that Guyana’s history would have been different if PPP leaders around Guyana had insisted that Ralph Ramkarran be the presidential candidate in 2011. I believe the PPP would have won in 2011 and maybe never lose again.
I am unable to comprehend, and still do, why some fine young men with good political prospects in the AFC complained bitterly to me about what the monarchs of the AFC did in May 2015, yet accepted the moral sickness and stayed in the AFC. I am referring once more to the AFC offering the Ministry of the Environment to a complete stranger while they were in that room and were ignored despite their glorious record in the AFC.
Against this background, I will discuss for the rest of this column a letter by Tacuma Ogunseye in the newspapers of April 29. My focus is not on the letter writer but the lessons the contents hold for people of any age that want to join a political party.
Here are the words of Ogunseye, “I invoke my right to contest Mr. Granger’s claims that he managed the coalition properly. I disagree. If I am to grade his performance it will be a “C.” Granger did not manage either the APNU or the APNU + AFC coalition and government properly. The assessment of Granger’s stewardship of the APNU and the coalition is important for future coalition politics.”
Obviously, one cannot lose sight of the fact that this assessment of the letter writer comes months after the APNU+AFC lost power and not before in the five years that APNU+AFC held power. Here are some bitingly relevant words in that letter, “The WPA’s Executive will at some point state its assessment and experiences in the APNU/ APNU+ AFC coalition and government.”
Why would they want to do that after they lost power and not before so that if the weaknesses could have been corrected between May 2015 and May 2016 or 2017, then APNU+AFC would still have been in power? One of the vital lessons of life since time immemorial is that if you tell a leader what he wants to hear and not what he should be told from your heart and soul then that leader will continue wallowing in the mess he created. Tragedy then, will strike consuming you and your leader.
The reader of Ogunseye’s letter, I am absolutely sure will ask, “Why didn’t the WPA try to correct the mess that it found when the coalition entered politics?” If the PPP leaders had corrected the presidential candidate mistake, it would not have lost in 2011 and 2015. If the young Turks had confronted the AFC’s monarchs in May 2015 and demanded, “We must give ministerial jobs to those who work for the party and not friends of the leaders,” then maybe the AFC would not have been the stink, fetid, dead meat that it became after 2015.
Sadly for Ogunseye, the young Turks in the AFC and many like them who fought to have power, they threw it away when they got it. They stood silently and watched their mediocre, inept, visionless leaders put the jackass before the cart and they jumped on the ass that led them into the trench where they still are.
(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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The stupidest yet deadliest person alive is the party sycophant

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