The ultimate rubber stamping

May 05, 2024 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The Congress of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) is supposed to be the highest democratic forum of the party. It is Congress that is supposed to give directions to the party’s leadership, not the other way around.

However, in the case of the PPP, the situation has always been that it is the leadership of the party that exhibits overweening and overwhelming influence over what delegates do and decide at the party’s Congress. In effect, Congress has always been transformed into the ultimate rubber stamping of the PPP’s leadership.

What the leadership wants is what the leadership gets. What the delegates feel and desire are subordinated to the larger interests of the leadership.

At a previous Congress, there was an attempt to pass a resolution removing references from Marxism-Leninism from the party’s Constitution. The leadership assailed that attempt and from that moment onward, the prime move of that resolution became the victim of a vendetta within the party.

Another resolution that proposed that the positions of general secretary be contested at the congress was also shot down. The failure of the congress to adopt this particular resolution has allowed the appointment of both the general secretary and presidential candidates to be made by the party’s Central Committee.

Today, the PPP has been seized by the bourgeois class and that class is now brazen enough to make its gambit public. The Congress will most likely successfully pass that very resolution, about Marxism-Leninism, which was rejected in the past. And it will do so because the present leadership of the party has become beholden to the bourgeois class. But you can bet also that the same Congress will remain silent on the issue of how the general secretary and presidential candidates are selected.

The leadership of the party will get what it wants today. The delegates will toe the line of the leadership. The Congress will become a stage-managed affair as it was in the past.

The leadership of the party manages the narrative of the party. Internal democracy and free expressions become causalities of the narrative that will be pedaled. At a previous Congress, persons were placed into the various caucuses to guide the discussions; but their true purpose was to ensure that the delegates towed the line of the leadership.

The narrative for this Congress has been set for months now. The party’s delegates have been bombarded with rhetoric that the government and party are under siege and that enemies are at the gates. The enemies have long been identified as the Opposition, elements of the middle class, the Kaieteur News and Stabroek News.

The delegates will be told again about the enemies that are encircling the party and therefore the delegates in turn must circle the wagons, they must unite to repel the threat from the Opposition and from Kaieteur News and Stabroek News.

They will be told this is not the time for internal dissent or divisions. If the enemies are at the gate, then it is time to forget the internal problems. It is time to look past the deviations of the leadership and to unite to repel enemies at the gate.

This is the narrative that will infect the Congress and ensure that the leadership obtains a free pass, free from any serious scrutiny or identification of its missteps.

This narrative also serves the interests of the party leadership. When presented with the narrative that both the party and the government are facing attacks, delegates are less likely to criticise the leadership, as doing so could be interpreted as a lack of confidence in a time of crisis. Consequently, the leadership’s shortcomings may be ignored in favour of maintaining a unified stance against external threats.

The role of delegates has long been distorted. It is the Congress which ought to have selected the Presidential candidate of the party. But the leadership took it upon itself to foist the Presidential candidate on the party.

Elections are one year away. The delegates could use this opportunity to endorse Irfaan Ali as the presidential candidate for the party. This would at least ensure that the President does not have to kowtow to anyone in the party in order to ensure that he retains the confidence of the leadership for the next elections. It is the least that the delegates can do to salvage their own importance within the party and ensure that the seizure of the party by the bourgeois class is not total and final.

(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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• Congress, exhibits, leadership, People’s Progressive Party (PPP), transformed

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