The PNC/R is a rigging machine

Apr 01, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The PNC now PNC/R has been attempting to remake its political image for decades. But the conduct of the party during the 2020 elections impasse – a controversy of its own making – demonstrates that the PNC/R never ditched its undemocratic character and is prepared to win power by hook or crook.
No amount of remaking its image or attempts at democratic window dressing will obscure the party undemocratic credentials which date back to its rigging of the 1968, 1973, 1980 and 1985 elections, and the referendum of 1978. The PNC/R by its conduct in the post-March 2020 elections has revealed that the party remains a habitual rigging machine.
After Forbes Burnham died, the economic hit a stone wall. There was no way out of the crisis. Burnham’s successor, Desmond Hoyte, a notorious election rigger, was forced to make economic reforms since the economy was crumbling further under his rule. Following the end of the Cold War, he aligned the economy on the path of western liberalisation but his politics remained authoritarian and undemocratic.
He attempted to remake his image as one of change – trying to put some distance between himself and Burnham, even to the point of exiling some of the government’s foremost left wing ideologues. He presented himself in the 1992 elections as a reformer.
But the people of Guyana had seen through his public relations smokescreen. The PNC was booted out of power in 1992.
In 1997, having lost fairly and squarely to the PPP/C, the PNC tried to seize power through street protests. It failed to do so but in the process exposed its insatiable lust for power.
By 2001, the party had rebranded itself as the PNC/R, attaching a Reform component to the original title of the party in an attempt to change its image of the party and to append a civic component to the party. It wanted to appeal more to the business class and to voters who were discontent with ethnic polarisation. The PNC/R however, was the same old PNC and it lost those elections also.
In 2006, the party entered the elections as the PNC/R-One Guyana (PNCR-1G). But most people did not take that coalition seriously, knowing that the other partners in the grouping were marginal and that the real power remained with the PNC/R.
Having lost those elections massively, the PNC/R saw the writing on the wall.
It, therefore, set about again to remake its political image. It initiated something called caucuses to elect its Presidential candidate and present itself as enjoying internal democracy. But there were concerns expressed about just how democratic was that process seeing that one of the candidates was virtually hand-picked and enjoyed the support, tacit and otherwise, of a powerful section of the party’s leadership.
The party’s attempt at Big Tent politics was generally rebuffed but it persisted with rebranding itself as a supporter of coalition politics. Along with some marginal parties it formed a grouping, with some marginal parties, known as A Partnership for National Unity (APNU).
It did not win the 2011 elections but along with the AFC managed to secure a majority in the National Assembly. The party showed its character in the National Assembly through its high-handed tactics such as when it tried to prevent an elected member from speaking in the National Assembly and changing the Standing Orders to ensure that the combined Opposition, rather than the government side of the House, held the majority in a number of committees.
In the 2015 elections, the PNC/R joined with the AFC to establish the APNU+AFC government. Pervasive corruption and the luxurious lifestyles which some PPP/C leaders flaunted created an opening which the Coalition exploited, and it won a narrow one-seat majority, thus forming the government.
But the PNC/R could not resist the temptation to dominate its main Coalition partner, the AFC. And it did so to its own detriment, comprehensively losing the 2016 and 2018 local government elections and then losing the 2020 General and Regional Elections.
The APNU+AFC’s defiance of the no-confidence motion and its attempt to benefit from the rigging of the 2020 general and regional elections showed that the PNC/R as a political leopard had not lost its stripes. It is a party with dictatorial tendencies.
Guyanese must not be fooled by political window dressing. Nothing has changed within the PNC/R. Nothing will change.
By still sticking to the shameless and utterly discredited narrative, about the PPP/C stealing the elections and being installed with the support of the United States, the PNC/R remains non-trustworthy. No amount of changes to its leadership or claims to greater internal democracy will alter that fact.
(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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