The PNC/R is a divided house

Aug 10, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – There was a coup within the PNC/R. Following the defeat of the APNU+AFC at the March 2, 2020 elections, a mutiny broke out within the party with rogue forces directing their ire towards the then incumbent leader David Granger.

Those forces were opposed to the Granger’s acceptance of the final declaration of results of the elections. Their opposition was mirrored by other elements in society who wanted Granger to intervene and scrap the result of the elections and, supposedly, to rule by decree.

Granger however took the constitutional path. That path meant that he was compelled to accept the final declaration of GECOM. He did so and as a result, the rebellion against him intensified.

Some of his former colleagues even sided against him. Their chagrin was that he should not have given up power. In the end, he was isolated, and the person many saw as being aligned to him also became the victim of the campaign against the former leader of the PNC/R.

At the heart of the plot to unseat Granger from the party’s leadership was that he should have allowed the rigging to proceed. The PNC/R has a notorious history of electoral rigging dating back to the 1968 polls. At that time, it went by the name PNC. It rigged the 1968, 1973, 1980 and 1985 elections and attempted to benefit from attempts to rig the 2020 elections.
In each of those successive elections, the rigging became more glaring, brazen and barefaced. Peter D’Aguiar, a former ally of the PNC, said this about the 1968 elections: “To call it an election is to give it a name it does not deserve; it was a seizure of power by fraud, not election.” The 1973 elections were branded as “fairy tale elections”. The British Parliamentary Group of Observers described the 1980 elections as being more “crooked than barbed wire.” The PNC also rigged the 1978 referendum which gave it power to change the Constitution.

The world changed in 1989 when the Cold War ended and the PNC knew that it could no longer rig its way to power. It lost the 1992 elections and all successive elections until the 2015 polls when the APNU+AFC narrowly defeated the PPP/C which had ruled for 23 years.

Following its electoral humiliation in the 2006 polls when Bharrat Jagdeo swept aside Robert Corbin by more than 20 percent of the votes cast, the PNC/R decided to rebrand itself. It projected itself as a party practising internal democracy in the choice of its Presidential candidate. It opted for a new image and a new leader. It opted for David Granger.

While he lost the 2011 polls, he successfully put together with the AFC an electoral coalition, which narrowly won the 2015 elections. David Granger represented, in the words of the party, integrity, decency and honesty.

But apparently that was not good enough for the rogue elements in the PNC/R which wanted him to condone the rigging of the 2020 general elections. He did not. He accepted the declaration of the Guyana Elections Commission and began to prepare his party for its role in the Opposition.

Realising that the party needed to invest in younger leadership, he appointed a number of young persons and newcomers to the National Assembly. He also left out a number of stalwarts. This became the occasion for further animosity against Granger and in the end, he did not have the strength or support to avoid the plot against him. He decided not to contest the leadership of the party and retired into the political sunset.

The results of the party’s 2021 Congress represented an almost complete change of guard within the PNC/R. Even the General Secretary was not returned. The Granger brand had all but been erased.

There are Kingmakers behind the scenes that are determined to ensure that the party returns to its old ways. And given the devastating psychological impact which the election loss has had on sections of the party, it is not likely that the party can be rescued from its present handlers.

The PNC/R is a divided house and is likely to not be in the best of financial straits. But come elections, the factions will come together. And the party can be assured that once a date for elections is named, the cowardly business class in this country is going to set aside their contribution envelopes to finance the PNC/R’s elections campaign.

(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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