David Hinds’s jaundiced views in conflict with reality (Pt 1)

Dear Editor,
Last Thursday, September 7th, a section of the local media featured an article in which WPA Executive Member Dr David Hinds believes, “For the good of Guyana… PPP’s barrage has to be countered and stopped.”
In this article, Dr Hinds was quoted as saying, “The People’s Progressive Party (PPP) has been peddling the perception that the APNU+AFC coalition is not only fraught with incompetent ministers, but (is) also virtually incapable of running the presidency effectively.”
He added that, since losing power in 2015, the PPP “has been relentless in its campaign to delegitimize the government, often without challenge from the governing parties.”
Like other WPA members of old, David Hinds was one of those who fearlessly fought the PNC in the trenches for a better Guyana. But like Moses Nagamootoo and Khemraj Ramjattan of the AFC, he, too, has abandoned the noble goals of fighting for the downtrodden, and has now aligned himself with the oppressors for personal gains, much to the disgust of those who once admired him.
As a political commentator and civil rights advocate, Hinds’s jaundice views are often in conflict with reality and expose his biased preference for one ethnicity over another.
I admit that the PPP’s media blitz has indeed been relentless since losing power in 2015, but when we expose the remarkable ineptitude and incompetence of the APNU+AFC coalition he supports, and accuses the Granger Administration as being “virtually incapable of running the presidency effectively” because of the high numbers of “incompetent ministers” in government, it is not a “perception”, it is factually correct. And David Hinds knows it.
Perhaps he is making a pitch to take over the Government’s PR department, which has long been criticized by KN Peeping Tom as being hopeless. He argues, “The PPP’s barrage, in the context of weak responses from the coalition parties and basic errors of judgment by the government, has had the effect of casting doubt in the minds of Guyanese. The (PPP) party has also been able to successfully hitch its assault on the government to legitimate civil society concerns about protests against government policies such as the parking meter issue, the sugar impasse, the broadcast legislation, the vendors’ issue and the wages struggle. This has led to the PPP gaining sympathy in sections of the media establishment, the business sector and the brown middle-class.”
Did Hinds actually say that? Why is it that people like Eric Phillips and David Hinds always seem to view things through their ethnic eyes? Where were David Hinds and Eric Phillips, the black-rights activists, when the Government they protect and serve evicted 41 mostly black cash-crop farmers from their farms in Naarstigheid, West Coast Berbice, and took away their livelihood? The PPP did not do a colour-test, neither did we ask what shade of black or brown they were when the farmers asked for our assistance. It was the PPP who defended their rights in the courts, and I did not see David Hinds or Eric Phillips there.
But like some of his ilk, David Hinds is now an apologist for the Granger Administration. They have made campaigning for, and defending, this Government a profession. It is no longer about people’s rights, their interest is defending the perks they’re benefiting from. Like Nagamootoo and Ramjattan of the AFC, the WPA leaders have it good now. They’re the ones living the “good life” with the lucrative state jobs they now hold, doing basically nothing… just living off of the sweet. Dr Hinds is so willing to excuse the Government’s ineptitude as a learning curve that he describes the continuous scandals and corruption as “basic errors of judgment by the government.” Yet, under the PPP, basic administrative errors were described as “massive corruption”. And after two years of exhaustive investigations by SOCU, there is still no evidence to prove massive PPP corruption and the raping of the treasury. These were all deliberate, fabricated lies and PNC propaganda designed to taint the PPP in government.

Sincerely,
HARRY GILL
PPP/C Member of
Parliament