‘PNC congress and the African dilemma’

May 20, 2024 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Kaieteur News – The People’s Progressive Party (PPP) has just completed a very orderly and successful 32^ndcongress in which all the girls and boys were nicely placed in their slots. Unlike what is taking place in the Peoples’s National Congress (PNC),the PPP’s congress was some five years overdue without there being much public bickering from the membership. This is not because Indian Guyanese, who are overwhelmingly represented in the PPP are less quarrelsome than Africans who are mainly in the PNC but is a logical outcome of the party’s organizational ‘democratic centralist’ credo that prioritises the wishes of the centre!

The PPP’s formal relinquishing of Marxism/Leninism and not ‘democratic centralism’ is most telling, since the notions of the vanguard party and democratic centralism are arguably the most important contributions Lenin made to Marxism. Karl Marx had a somewhat different formulation: he argued that communists should have been the vanguard of working-class parties. But for Lenin, ‘iron discipline’ was necessary if he was to build socialism in his country on the backs of peasantry instead of an advanced proletariat –a conscious self-motivated working class that had already become ‘a class for themselves’ – as Marx’s conceptualization demanded.

Note too that Lenin was pupil and admirer of the utopian socialist Nicholi Chernyshevsky, whose novel What is to be done ‘far more than Marx’s Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done).  His efforts to implement his utopian scheme may have cost untold amounts of lives and suffering but at least having recognized the suffering of working people, he sought a solution by also askingWhat is to be done?

Iron discipline, total central control, i.e. democratic centralism, is also today essential as the PPP, which has over decades propagandistically emasculated the political will of the Indian people and now sees itself as its only true political expression, seeking on their behalf to establish ethnic/political dominance by suppressing Africans. This reality has now come upon some unexpected but nevertheless significant quarters. For example, speaking to the African condition in an article entitled ‘Granger says PPP/C waging war against IDPADA-G’, the former president is of the view that ‘PPPC administrations, for 27 years, set out to debilitate, dominate, humiliate and manipulate legitimate African-Guyanese organisations…which, ultimately, was aimed at ensuring a good life for African Guyanese. ’

Of course, the title is quite an unnecessary euphemism, for to seek to destroy an organisation like IDPADA-G is to seek the destruction of the African people and not simply a given organisation. That is why many United Nations conventions specify that persons including minorities have the right to establish and maintain their own associations and the duty of government is to facilitate their doing so rather than undermine and attempt to control such efforts as the PPP is seeking to do!

Unfortunately, the former leader of the PNC did not as Lenin did ask and answer the all-important question ‘What is to be done?’ Or more precisely, he sought to pass the buck to end this travesty to the very people that initiated it! ‘The PPP needs to account to the nation and the international community for its failure to implement the UN Declaration for the Decade of People of African Descent!’ One must hope that he and his party uses its next congress to go beyond such wishful thinking.

The PNC continues to be the more democratic of the two large parties and it appears that one will only have to wait another couple of months and not three more years for its next congress. As many liberal democracies, the public quarrels the party has been having between the contestants and their supporters and of which the propagandists of the PPP have been attempting to take advantage, is not unusual in more open and democratic environments and should be applauded. Furthermore, since election of the new leadership is usually one of the most important agenda items at congress, one should be aware that the oligarchs in the PNC and more mature liberal democracies still try to use all kinds of underhand methods to get their preferred people elected.

‘Clinton and Obama exchange insults as Democratic campaign debate gets personal’ (The Guardian, 22/01/2008).After Bill Clinton got in the race and made perceived racial remarks relating to Obama, Ted Kennedy of the influential Kennedy clan accused the former president of being partly responsibility for making race an issue in the campaign. In 2016, leaked emails of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) showed that although the body had publicly stated that it was neutral, several of its operatives openly derided Sanders’s campaign and discussed ways to advance Hillary Clinton’s nomination. Clinton may have even had a hand in the hiring decisions of the DNC. Right here, elections at the previous congress were well conducted but this cannot totally discount the awareness that at the 2011 PNC congress the ballot box was ‘accidentally’ overturned and so too was the then perceived winner!

To date, there are only two contestants for the leadership of the PNC and upto this stage my take on what we have been hearing are generalised platitudes about the wickedness of the PPP, the need for vision, party unity, the need for more youths to be involved, etc. Constitutional reform is on the agenda: its former leader has identified the major problem that requires important governance and other structural changes sand what is now required is more precise answers to the question, What is to be done?

Mr. Norton has the advantage of incumbency and as noted above Africans have been the major supporters of his party for decades and at the last leadership elections his 967 votes were the highest ever gained by a contestant since the PNC established primaries. I concede to those who will say that the outcome was not as simple as that, but Mr. Norton as the present leader needs to understand that suboptimality is now embedded in general social/economic management under the current institutional and structural regimes.  Furthermore, not to the exclusion of any ethnic group, she and his party have the responsibility to deal frontally and in some depth with the African dilemmaby using the congress to design and seek to establish de facto inclusive governance arrangements.

Sincerely,

Dr. Henry Jeffrey

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• African dilemma, Dr Henry Jeffrey, Letters, PNC Congress

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