Dear Editor,
Does changing or rather exchanging the leadership of the AFC obliterate all the wrong doings of that Party? Despite the numerous ‘wrong turns’ they have made?
The new AFC leader and his team are on the road smiling, laughing, handshaking, invoking and sometimes gyrating to Bollywood songs trying to instill into the minds of its lost supporters and Guyanese at large that there is indeed ‘change’ but this a vain effort to hoodwink them yet again. Since 2005 the AFC was ‘Unlocking the potential of Guyana’ and the mantra now is ‘Better must come’, how can this be possible when the AFC squandered each and every opportunity to be independent and work for the good on the people of Guyana. The goal was and still is to ‘kick’ out the PPP/C from Government and to share the ‘spoils’.
In order to achieve this they joined forces with the PNC in Parliament prior to 2015 to destabilise by rejecting everything which the PPP/C Government presented therein by the PPP/C Government resulting in a No Confidence Motion which consequently led to an early General Election in 2015. However, this alliance did not end there, casting all pretensions and founding principles into the garbage bin and they joined with the PNC on Valentine’s Day 2015 in a ‘marriage of convenience’ which destroyed their public image forever, ‘rebranding’ to regain its identity (Cathy Hughes at AFC’s 7th Conference) to market the AFC will not work. The dead cannot be invoked and the soul is already locked away in eternal damnation.
The PNC has a history of betrayals of smaller parties, like the UF in 1964 but in the case of the AFC they clung on to dear life despite being kicked around by the PNC. But it was not a case of only being subservient to the PNC, the AFC became the PNC. There was no distinction and the AFC sang merrily along. Together they violated the Constitution, they raided the Treasury, they enriched themselves and family, they co-operated on spurious and costly and wasteful litigations, they bankrupted the country, destroyed all the socio-economic gains made by the PPP/C Government, and then to crown it off, together they attempted to rig the 2020 General Elections together. Guyanese began to reminisce the dark days of the PNC from 1964 to 1992.
It must be recalled that the late Ramon Gaskin had said in 2015 that, ‘I noticed that in the coalition talks, they were only talking about who gets what and what goes to whom. I am very disappointed with that, because in the entire discussions, all they could have said was that this goes to that person, he gets that, she gets this and nothing is said about the needs of the Guyanese people.’ He added that, ‘they should have first worked out a programme for what is to be good for Guyana…you are preaching that you want the good of Guyana then show that…in my opinion they did it the wrong way around.’
Despite vowing not to coalesce with the PNC, the AFC and its leaders know that they need to piggyback on the PNC to be relevant. Despite Hughes’ rhetoric about ‘reimaging’ and Cathy’s ‘rebranding’ and once again ‘of what is in the best interest of the country’ the AFC is cognisant of the fact that the AFC no longer commands the respect of the people who walked away. These will never return. Those few who remained in the AFC were and are diehard PNC so they are comfortably ensconced at home. The local Government Elections in 2018 provided the proof. And once again it was about distributing the ‘spoils’- ‘who gets what’. This time around it will be chaos unparalleled. Who will be the Presidential candidate? Who will be the Prime Ministerial candidate? How will the seats be shared?
The AFC will again coalesce with the PNC in the end before the 2025 Elections.
Yours sincerely,
Haseef Yusuf
