Mr. Juman-Yassin’s letter is yet another opportunity for me

Nov 15, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – In a letter to the press yesterday, well known city attorney, K. A. Juman-Yassin (KAJY), in writing on electoral reform noted: “Two political parties, the PPP and the PNC, have been in government since then and it is for another article to discuss this failure and aberration in our society.”
I will await the forthcoming article but I hope it goes beyond the sentence, which I quoted from KAJY. His letter gives me another opportunity to reinforce my advocacy for applying other paradigms in trying to understand the failure to transform Guyana from a polity of ethnic strife, political exclusion and anachronistic political culture.
Here are eight pieces by me (this column makes it nine) that advocate for a new approach to analysing the recurrent failures in Guyanese politics. KAJY used the word “aberration” and it is from the use of that noun, I will further challenge theorists and political observers who continue to see Guyana’s political economy and sociological forms through the prism of a dire struggle for domination by the PNC and PPP.
1 – Wednesday, July 22, 2020, “Dr. McDoom’s pair of red underwear has lost its brightness and shape.”
2 – Sunday, October 4, 2020, “Dialectics in Guyana’s politics: An alternative theory.”
3 – Tuesday, July 14, 2020, “In the diaspora, in Plato’s cave.”
4 – July 28, 2020, “Trotz, de Souza and rigging: The imprisoned Freudian mind.”
5 – Monday, December 14, 2020, “The sickening admission/confession of Raphael Trotman.”
6 – September 25, 2021, “Recording history: Dr. Tarron Khemraj adds his two cents.”
7 – Saturday, October 2, 2021, “The PPP/PNC song and bell have been sung out and rung out.”
8 – Monday, November 1, 2021, “This huge gap in Guyanese politics has to be filled.”
If there is any aberration in the use of power that generates a pessimistic refrain in the minds of Guyanese, it occurred after 2015. After 2015, the PPP no longer exercised state power. The PNC was not a complete hegemonic actor in the state because its hegemony was quantitatively shared by extensive latitude possessed by the Alliance For Change (AFC). Top revolutionary, transformative Rodneyite figures from the 1970s – Drs. Clive Thomas, Rupert Roopnaraine and Maurice Odle – were in government. They represented the Working People’s Alliance (WPA).
The word, “fantastic” would not be out of place to describe the anatomy and biology of the WPA from 1974 and the AFC from 2006. They were blessed with multi-racial constituencies, had superbly educated, multi-racial leaders who did not lack charisma, and were fervent denouncers of the direction the two main parties – PNC and PPP – had taken Guyana since the split between Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham in the first half of the 1950s.
The anticipation in 2015 that the WPA would dissolve the old way of using state power resided in the exemplary praxis of Drs. Thomas and Roopnaraine. Both men were extremely close to Walter Rodney and their praxis was matched by their intellectual depth.
Thomas was the author of one of the most sweeping condemnations of capitalist economics. The book is entitled: “Dependency and Transformation. The Economics of the Transition to Socialism.” Here are the names of three books that give you an insight into the admirable minds of these two gentlemen: Clairmont Chung’s “Walter Rodney: A Promise of Revolution”; Frank Birbalsingh’s “the PPP of Guyana, 1950-1992: An Oral History”; Rupert Roopnaraine’s “The Sky’s Wild Noise: Selected Essays.”
When you read these books and you juxtapose them against the abysmal failure of the three WPA personalities in the government after 2015, then the aberration that KAJY referred to cannot be laid at the doorstep of the PPP and PNC.
The AFC became the second most successful third party in the history of the Caribbean after the United Force in this very country in the early 1960s. Viewed by the Guyanese society as the final answer to the racial dimensions in the physiology of the PPP and PNC, the AFC itself reinforced its strength among the Guyanese by declaring it will never partner with the PNC or the PPP. It told the nation once it did that, the AFC will become dead meat.
What happened after 2015 with the AFC in power constitutes one of the most painful tragedies in the 21st century in the entire world. It may be true to say that Guyana has not yet recovered from the failed promise of the AFC. The PPP was not in power in 2015. The PNC shared power after 2015 with the AFC. Yet power was used in the same old way. One then has to look for new paradigms to understand this stagnation. I have offered my theories in several articles. I will wait for what KAJY has to add.

(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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