The PPP/PNC song and bell have been sung out and rung out

Oct 02, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – There is an entity named Overseas Friends of the WPA (OFWPA). It is headed by former Secretary to the Anglican Diocese under Bishop George’s leadership in the 1970s. His name is Keith Branch.
I only met Mr. Branch once when he was on a visit and we had breakfast at the Tastee Snack Restaurant on David Street, Kitty. After that our relationship deteriorated when he threatened to sue me for libel over my analysis of the degeneration of WPA’s politics. Mr. Branch returned to Guyana for the election campaign of March 2020.
In that campaign, one video clip I saw with him, he came across more of an Africanised politician than a Rodneyite. But then again, who in what is left of the WPA is a Rodneyite? All former high profile leaders of the WPA in Guyana who have migrated constitute the core of OFWPA.
The list includes Eusi Kwayana, Moses Bhagwan, Dr. Nigel Westmaas and Dr. Alissa Trotz. One of the main figures behind OFWPA is New York based Rohit Kanhai, a WPA fanatic. Mr. Kanhai publishes a newspaper dedicated to keeping the WPA alive. It is titled “Caribbean Daylight.” Neither Mr. Kanhai, Caribbean Daylight or OFWPA has any light about them. A more appropriate name would be Caribbean Darkness.
On Thursday, Mr. Kanhai published a letter in the newspaper. Its title is: “In politics, the struggle for power always obliterates logic.” Interestingly, Mr. Kanhai did not sign in his personal capacity but as belonging to the WPA. The letter has an ironic title because there is nothing logical in his adumbration.
Mr. Kanhai’s fulmination against the PPP and PNC is outdated. Such analyses are no longer valid except for the recording of history. History has recorded the sins and virtues of the PPP and PNC. The analysts have to understand that the dynamism of politics have thrown up new dimensions by new actors.
In my column of Saturday, September 25, 2021, captioned, “Recording history: Dr. Tarron Khemraj adds his two cents,” I observed, “Researchers then need to focus on the changing nature of Guyanese politics since 2011. The configurations, permutations and variables have changed. Guyanese politics has become more dangerous and more unpredictable because the mainstream players – PNC and PPP – have been sharing space with other political parties whose capacity to shape events have led to more deleterious effects. The AFC and WPA have played no small part in taking us to the uncertain stage we are at.”
Mr. Kanhai’s long letter traces the mentality and political culture of the PPP and PNC and brings it up right to the present time. But if you are from another planet, on reading Kanhai’s, you would never think, even for a fleeting second, that Mr. Kanhai’s party was in the halls of power for five year – 2015-2020 – and some of those leaders were iconic figures long established as revolutionary actors from the seventies onwards until March when they began to support rigged elections.
I quote from the letter of Kanhai and I would urge readers to reflect carefully on what the man penned because for me this is not only a dishonest offering but propaganda trying to pass itself as academic analysis. Here is Kanhai’s propaganda. “The non-ideological struggle for power currently centers on the trillions of dollars in new-found oil wealth. Both the PPP and the PNC recognize that money is not colored by ideology, but by power and in the Guyana currency, race. This was starkly revealed in the last elections, when every attempt was made by the PNC, to hold on to power. This included a repudiation of the very electoral process that had brought it to power.”
Would one believe that the Manager of Rodney House (the WPA’s head office), Desmond Trotman, who sits as Kanhai’s colleague in the WPA is one of the GECOM commissioners? Trotman was a non-objective, non-partisan player in Kanhai’s own admission of electoral rigging in March last year. There is nothing in Kanhai’s missive, not even a line, that questions the role of his party in government from 2015-2020. Instead we read about the race for oil money by the two traditional actors – PNC and PPP.
The obvious question is: When this race was going on between 2015 and 2020 was Kanhai’s party an innocent bystander? Was the WPA a small party in the opposition crying in the wilderness that the two giants were fighting for Guyana’s oil wealth? On the contrary, the WPA was part of the ruling entity and by not resigning from government when the race for oil money was on, showed that it was part of the “hustler culture.” It is part too, of the tragedy of March 2020.

(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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