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Political blood brothers
(Kaieteur News) – It can be said again that politics makes for the strangest of bedfellows in Guyana. The political brotherhood of the PPP/C and APNU is not any ordinary relationship. It is the relationship between political blood brothers that goes deep under the skin. They have the best arrangement in place, what has worked for them for decades. In times past, the old PPP and PNC have looked out for one another, ran to the side of the other, and taken care of each other. What has left Guyanese with their mouths open has worked nicely for the reciprocal benefit of the two generational political behemoths in the local environment.
The objective is that the monopoly holds that the PPP/C and now APNU have over the hearts and thinking of Guyanese must continue unimpeded, regardless of the sacrifice that must be made by one or the other group. Regardless of the appearance that there may be some dark alliance, some backdoor dealing, going on between the PPPC and APNU. The PPP added the C (Civic) component to its name, and there is still the same wheeling and dealing between the PPPC and the PNCR (the reform aspect notwithstanding). The PNC blended under the broader tent of APNU, and nothing changed in terms of its nuanced, and sometimes not-so-nuanced, dance with the PPP/C.
We recall from over 50 years ago, that there was the PPP leader, Dr. Cheddi Jagan, moving away from his hardline resistance to the PNC of his archnemesis, Forbes Burnham, through the timely concoction of “critical support.” There were all those disturbances from the 1960s, and the resulting devastations that have continued to this day (capital flight, intellectual capital flight), and there was Jagan and his brainchild of “critical support.” On the one hand, there were cane fields that became an outlet for political frustrations, with some of them going up in smoke. On the other, there was critical support, the mystery that was not so much of a mystery, with Venezuela and nationalization held aloft as contributing factors for Jagan’s and the PPP’s change of heart, siding with the devil, Burnham.
In 2016, the APNU+AFC signed that disastrous Production Sharing Agreement with ExxonMobil, and Guyanese are still struggling to find ways out of that mess that gets worse when ExxonMobil’s heavy-handed dominance becomes more obvious. Since then, different citizens have approached the Office of the Commissioner of Information for documents that could shed some light on the bases for the APNU+AFC sealing that deal with ExxonMobil, only for the PPPC Government to stand as an unyielding block in their way. The British-based Clyde report is being held under lock-and-key by the PPPC Government, through its Office of the Commissioner of Information. So, it is also with the Bridging Deed, Escrow, and other documents, including requests that seek to get to the bottom of oil and gas developments.
The PPPC was so much against (and laudably so) the ExxonMobil oil deal, only for it to use its governing power to block Guyanese from accessing what the law allows. Why would the PPPC have any interest in concealing the work of the APNU+AFC during its time in office, when the ruling party’s leaders found so much that was offensive about the ExxonMobil deal? It is how the two political whales take care of each other by closing ranks to keep the sea wolves at bay. Now the APNU has just returned the favour by coalescing with the PPPC in tense Regional Democratic Councils’ elections, to push the We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) group to the margins. The WIN upstarts represent a clear and present danger, and a future political menace, that could crack the PPPC-APNU code, and put one or both of the two sides out of business.
Guyanese now get a tutorial on real politick, Guyana style. The question is what is the APNU getting for its betrayal of those 79,000 Guyanese that voted for it? State boards and commissions rewards, concessions at the village level could all be richly package. Never forget oil money sharing in this curious version of shared governance. The seismic shift in the political landscape just got turned upside-down with those APNU council moves.
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