The Nassau plan and the Creole class’s paranoia in the AFC

Oct 01, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – There are three important questions in politics over the past 10 years that cry out for scholarly treatment. The date of the first one is unknown. The second one occurred in 2011. The third one took place in 2019. Two of them had to do with the reaction of the Creole middle class to the rise of Indian influence in the AFC. The incidents involved Raphael Trotman and Khemraj Ramjattan in confrontation with each other. The undated one was a plan by Trotman and David Granger before the AFC was born.
Trotman at a public meeting in Bartica during the 2016 local government election campaign was praising President Granger. He told his audience that after the 2015 election result was announced, Granger called him on the phone and said, “Raphael, this is Nassau.”
This was a political plan they both toyed around with at the airport in Nassau in the Bahamas while waiting to fly home. The idea revolved around a strategy that could make the PNC win a national election for the first time since self-government came with the 1953 election under the PPP led by Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham. After the British government suspended the government in 1953, the PNC since then has never won an election on its own.
Trotman did not explain the shape of the plan to the meeting. After his pronouncement in Bartica in 2016, no journalist has ever asked him or Granger what was the Nassau Plan. Here it is now for the first time in print. Granger’s instinct went into the direction of reforming the PNC with new faces without baggage. This new-look party will need a multi-racial partner that has support among the Western embassies, rural Indians and the business class in general.
Granger and Rupert Roopnaraine worked on the image of the PNC, while Trotman was responsible for the birth of the new multi-racial party. Trotman remains to this day one of Guyana’s most brilliant political tacticians if not the best. Trotman founded the AFC with heavy support from the embassies, business community and the urban Creole class, which dominated its leadership.
Then Trotman, familiar with his country’s history invented a masterpiece. Trotman knew that the Creole class in the fifties and sixties were going nowhere if they did not team up with the African proletariat. He knew a reformed PNC in partnership with a pure, urban middle class entity would not work in the 21st century. The 21st century was not the 1950s.
Trotman then invited a dark-skinned, Hindu leader from the PPP who was having trouble with his party and was expelled to co-lead the AFC – Khemraj Ramjattan. The Creole class in the AFC was livid. Ramjattan was immediately rejected by every leader in the AFC and members of the Creole middle class that had influence over the AFC. Some serious racist words were used in the rejection.
Trotman however, stood his ground. His argument and personality were persuasive and he succeeded. But Ramjattan’s presence in a Creole middle class organisation was not accepted. I remember Ramjattan inviting me to his birthday party at Gandhi Youth Organisation. The Creole middle class did not show up. I will always recall his words at his birthday party. He said, “I love my religion.”
In 2006, the AFC entered the election campaign with a pact between the two co-founders. In that year, Trotman would be the presidential candidate and Ramjattan taking the PM slot and the roles would be reversed in 2011. But as the 2011 campaign heated up, Trotman believed that the AFC might win a minority government and Ramjattan would be president. He then refused to back Ramjattan as presidential candidate. This was a situation of class entitlement. Trotman felt the raison d’être of the AFC was for the middle class to have state power. For more on this please Google the controversy.
In February 2019, Trotman in an interview with the Guyana Times dropped a similar bombshell to the one in 2011. At the January 2017 congress of the AFC at the Vreed-en-Hoop Secondary School, the congress mandated that Ramjattan would succeed Moses Nagamootoo as PM candidate for the 2020 election.
Trotman told the Guyana Times that changing the PM candidate could cause the APNU+AFC to lose the election and he was against the change. Please do a Google search on the second bombshell. Trotman preferred Nagamootoo because Nagamootoo was not a threat to middle class domination of the AFC because Nagamootoo was not from the former ROAR group that bankrolled the AFC. ROAR elements wanted to Indianise the AFC. Trotman was concerned about AFC becoming an Indian outfit.

(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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