The Leader of the Opposition and senior functionaries of the Opposition were mostly absent during the Easter Holiday weekend. The Leader of the Opposition was invited to be present and speak at the Bartica Regatta. He barely showed up, and walked away without speaking. He was brutally ignored by his own supporters. He walked away in total humiliation.
The stark reality is that, if the political parties other than the PNC compete in LGE 2023, the PPP would win more votes in any of the communities than all those parties combined. Still, it is irresponsible for political parties – who make claims that they represent people’s interest in our country – not to participate in LGE 2023 on June 12, 2023.
The PPP appears fully prepared for the elections, contesting for all available seats in LGE 2023. The PNC are having difficulty in finding candidates. At a time when they need all hands on deck, they tried barring their Chairperson from Congress Place. The WPA, ANUG, TCM, the AFC have “chickened” out of LGE 2023.
The ANUG Chair has announced he would contest an LGE seat as an independent candidate. ANUG and TCM admitted they are unable to contest in a meaningful way.
The AFC claimed the Voters’ List is a bogus list, even though it is the same list that they contested with in 2015 and 2020, and which they claimed were clean and high-quality, until they lost the 2020 elections. To this day, they cannot object legally to any name on the list, but continue to claim that the list is full of dead people – the excuse why they will not contest the LGE 2023. The truth is that the AFC cannot meaningfully put together a list of candidates for LGE 2023.
The WPA claim the PPP discriminate against Afro-Guyanese, and they will use June 12 as a Day of Resistance. If the PPP discriminate, that should make it easy for the WPA to mobilise Afro-Guyanese to come out and vote against the PPP in those communities where Afro-Guyanese voters dominate. The reality is that the WPA are unable to mobilise even a handful of persons to even put together a candidate list for any community in this country.
The indisputable truth is the PPP speak for more people in any community, regardless of ethnic make-up, than the WPA can dream of at this time. All the people who support the WPA today in Guyana cannot fill a mini-bus. The present WPA leaders have brought shame on the name of Walter Rodney.
Easter 2023 saw Guyanese getting together and celebrating in harmony as ONE GUYANA. Many said the traditional Rupununi Rodeo was the biggest ever. The traditional Bartica Regatta 2023 version has begun a kind of transformation that is establishing the regatta as more than an Easter event. The Easter Monday Picnic and Kite-Flying extravaganza was extraordinary in 2023. The engagement of the President and the Cabinet in both the religious and celebratory events between Good Friday and Easter Monday added to the new Irfaan Ali-inspired governance that has become very visible – Government on the ground, interacting and engaging the Guyanese people everywhere.
The vast majority of Guyanese have opted to move forward, ensuring our country is no longer impeded in its transformation by naysayers and bitter people. But a small group of gripers continue to sow disharmony, to find every fault they can imagine or perceive. One curious thing about this small band of naysayers is that they all claim to speak for large sections of the Guyanese people. A few of them have not even been living in Guyana for a significant period of time. Take, for instance, the trio of Rickford Burke, David Hinds and Tacuma Ogunseye. These bitter old men claim they speak on behalf of the Afro-Guyanese people. Burke is a member of the PNC; Ogunseye and Hinds are from the WPA. Other than people like Hinds and Ogunseye, who also claim they are leaders of the WPA, the WPA cannot register any kind of small gathering of WPA members, because, for all intents and purposes, the WPA is an extinct party.
Burke, Hinds and Ogunseye, among others, habitually arrogate to themselves the authority to speak for Afro-Guyanese. They do not even pretend to hide their racist agenda. Ogunseye has even come out and openly demanded that Afro-Guyanese Police and soldiers turn their weapons on Indo-Guyanese, and has repeatedly insisted he has no apologies. Hinds has defended him. Every day, these bitter men find some lonely fora to fulminate their hate. They clearly are out of step with the vast majority of Guyanese people, who have left such fossilised political foolishness behind them.
Burke and Hinds, this past week, attacked Kit Nascimento who, like the majority of Guyanese, was offended and horrified by the open racist call for violence in the name of the WPA, which emanated from the mouth of Ogunseye. In response, Burke and Hinds brutally attacked Nascimento, who responded and challenged them to contest elections to establish their bona fides as spokespersons for the Afro-Guyanese people. We should all demand that Ogunseye, Hinds and Burke come register for LGE, and contest the LGE.
This is an open call to Burke, Hinds and Ogunseye to prove they speak for anyone but their bitter selves. They can choose a community and prove they speak for more people than the PPP does in that community. These men must not “chicken” out of LGE.
