With the New Year excesses hopefully dissipated and elections coming up, the horses for the political races will be getting ready to enter the paddocks. Which in this case means the political parties gonna be nominating their presidential and PM candidates to fly their colours. But this being Guyana where – even more than in America – we believe that ANYBODY can be president, we’ll witness a veritable explosion of parties with newly-minted presidential and PM candidates!! Last go-around, your Eyewitness does believe there were at least a dozen of these efflorescences!
And as is usual, most evaporate into thin air the day after elections. Just one of them, ANUG, survived – if you can call it that since all of the founders have departed the scene and a new rag-tag bunch have slid into their seats. There’s the old conundrum of whether if both the blade and then the handle of an axe have been replaced, whether it’s the same axe!! In politics seems, it is!! When your Eyewitness wrote that some newbies “slid into their seats”, he doesn’t mean the “joinder one” they were supposed to share in Parliament. Sadly, they haven’t been able to pry out the second “joinder” individual who’s squatting waaaay beyond her time-sharing arrangement. That unfortunate denouement made folks question whether the original founders ever had the nous to survive in Guyanese politics.
Your Eyewitness expects that several new parties gonna be registered by members of the PNC who feel they can be better candidates than the incumbent Aubrey Norton. We have Amanza Waldron and Roysdale Forde – who challenged Norton for leadership but dropped out!! They claimed there were “manipulations” of the party mechanisms to deny them a fair shot at the apple!! But aren’t they more than a tad naïve?? The PNC’s history makes it genetically predisposed to “manipulations”!!
They also have a long – if inglorious – tradition of disgruntled but ambitious fellas starting new breakaway parties. Didn’t their “Founder leader” Forbes Burnham start the tradition by breaking away from the PPP when he declared “LEADER OR NOTHING!!”?? Following his example was Llewellyn John, a former Assistant General Secretary and Minister of Home Affairs, who founded the People’s Democratic Movement (PDM); Eusi Kwayana, a former General Secretary, who formed the Working People’s Alliance; Hamilton Green, a former General Secretary and Prime Minister, who flounced out and launched the Good and Green Guyana party; and finally, Raphael Trotman, a former MP, with the Alliance For Change (AFC).
There have been several outsider names – including a newspaper publisher and a philanthropic businessman – who’re playing coy on whether they’ll launch parties to run. Your Eyewitness thinks they will.
How else can they later introduce themselves as “former presidential candidate”??
…political expediency
The PPP also ain’t immune to the fissioning bug by members who think they didn’t get their shot at the presidential apple. Way back, they had a fella named Balram Singh Rai who launched a “Justice Party” and most recently there was Khemraj “Dead Meat” Ramjattan who hooked up with the PNC’s Raphael Trotman in their AFC venture. They were supposed to recapitulate Jagan and Burnham’s 1953 venture – and they did, with the most vicious infighting and backbiting against each other!!! As to what that proved is grist for ANOTHER mill!!
Anyhow, at their last June internal elections, neither stood for the leader’s role but Ramjattan declared, “unlike what some is saying about us – that we are a party that is dead, we are alive kicking and very deadly!” So, maybe, he was projecting this “deadly” quality of the AFC when recently – without mentioning the Buxton-based gunmen who were killing civilians like flies – he claimed the present PPP leadership had supported death squads!!
…at Biden’s last hurrah
Cutting through all the banalities spouted by politicians in the first world, let’s note that even as the death toll in Gaza went beyond 45,700, Biden’s approved a US$8B arms package for Israel – including heavy bombs.
