David Hinds, the WPA presidential candidate for the 2025 general elections, has been in the news recently because he castigated African-Guyanese who declare support for the PPP as “ass/bambsie/BT etc. lickers”. This is a crude ratcheting up of describing PNC supporters who signal any affinity to the PPP as “slave catchers”. While this is most likely a calculated, if cynical, attempt to garner attention for his moribund shell of a party, which has never been able to attract support following the assassination of its charismatic leader Dr Walter Rodney by Burnham’s PNC, it also represents a stubborn refusal to practise realistic, democratic, multiethnic politics in our new demographic dispensation.
The danger is that the social capital earned by Dr Rodney’s legacy and sacrifice may influence some to ignore the possibilities for a new and liberating politics in Guyana.
Hinds’s insult to African-Guyanese for choosing to support a party that has traditionally been associated with Indian-Guyanese (the PPP) is premised on the assumption that the dynamics that gave birth to our ethnically divided politics are immutable. They are not.
What were those dynamics? There were the imperialists who facilitated the fissioning of the carefully-crafted, all-inclusive nationalist movement represented by the PPP of 1950. The PNC just commemorated the beginning of that fissioning in 1955, when Forbes Burnham made his early “leader or nothing” demand.He soon parlayed the fears of African and Coloured Guyanese that they would be “swamped and subordinated” by a Jagan-led, Indian-dominated PPP by launching the PNC in 1957 as a coalition of his urban African support, along with the League of Coloured People (LCP) dominated by UDP, and Sydney King’s rural African support. Indian-Guyanese were then an electoral majority.
Those external divisive forces represented by the US and UK governments no longer have the colonial legitimacy for interference. But the major difference has been the demographic change, wherein neither the PPP nor any party dominated by a single ethnic group, such as the PNC, can now garner the 50% +1 demanded by democratic elections to govern the country. They now both depend on “swing” votes, whether from Amerindians or from the margins of the other groups, to win elections without rigging. This proposition moved from the theoretical to the practical in the general elections of 2011, 2015 and 2020.
While the PPP and PNC have always insisted they represent all ethnic groups, the PNC’s courting, then marriage, of the AFC, which had garnered “votes from the margins” in 2011 and 2015, proved that the old politics was over. The PPP’s victory in 2020 was due more to Granger’s shuttering of the Indian-dominated sugar plantations, which drove away the AFC’s Indian margin votes, than anything else.
Against this background, David Hinds’s early articulation of a closing of the traditional ranks of the PNC – now represented by the PNC, AFC and WPA – by proposing a pre-election coalition made sense. But only if combined with an expansive programme that also sought “margin votes” from Indian and Amerindian- Guyanese.
Over the last three years on the Globespan social media platform, I sought to make this point to Hinds, but he unequivocally rejected the possibility of Indian voters even staying and not voting for the PPP. Rather than encouraging PNC Indian-Guyanese members such as Mahipal, Narine and Chandan, who defended Indian-Guyanese and broadened the PNC’s appeal, he derided them as “slave catchers”. His strident warnings of “trouble” if the PPP “was installed again” through foreign intrigue or electoral rigging convinced me that his strategy made sense only if it was meant to scare away Indian-Guyanese via emigration.
His and the WPA’s delegitimisation of Aubrey Norton as PNC leader on their social media platforms, for his refusal to lead street protests, not only reinforced this view, but stigmatised the latter as a “thug” who could not strategise effectively.
What is troubling is Hinds’s insistence that African-Guyanese who now may support the PPP have to “assimilate”, “crawl” for some of the oil money (“drinking soup”) that the PPP as the government in office dispenses, and it is this he is objecting to. But it is the standard practice of all governments in democracies to tailor their spending, social and otherwise, as articulated in their manifestos/programmes to ultimately attract voters. So, if in a divided society of minorities – ethnically or economically – such as Guyana is, the spending attracts “non-traditional” voters, that is laudatory, not contemptible.
