Rejecting Henry Jeffrey’s racist dishonesty – the PPP is not a minority party

I have always had much disagreement with Henry Jeffrey’s positions. But, because we were once colleagues, I have studiously avoided responding to the many absurd positions he has adopted. In a long diatribe – “striving for an effective democracy” – that was published in the Kaieteur News of August 7, focusing mainly on Israel, he described the PPP as a “now substantial minority party”.
There are many things in the article that I disagreed with, but my column is limited to a certain number of words. Therefore, I will simply deal with this statement. For Jeffrey to describe the PPP as “now a substantial minority party”, he has gone stark crazy, living in la-la land. This is what hate does to a mind – he is now incapable of seeing the truth, or incapable of admitting the truth.
The PPP easily won the March 2, 2020 elections. Just past one week more than three years since those elections, the PNC, Jeffrey, and the other sycophants cannot bring themselves to admit that the people of Guyana rejected them and chose the PPP with an overwhelming majority on March 2, 2020. Since then, two things have become apparent. First, the PPP has attracted more support in Guyana, even making significant inroads into the support base of the PNC. Since then also, the other political parties in Guyana have virtually disappeared. The AFC is “dead meat”, just as had been predicted by its leader in early 2015. The WPA has been long dead. The other parties are nothing more than paper parties. The PPP is now a much larger majority party in Guyana than it was on March 2, 2020 when it won back the Government. The second thing that is apparent is that the PNC is now even more a minority party than it has ever been.
If anyone examine the facts, hard cold facts, the recent local government elections strongly confirmed that the PPP is growing in strength, with increasing support in every region of Guyana. At the same time, the recent LGE 2023 showed that the PNC is losing support in its base. The PPP won 67 of the 80 local government areas, with the PNC holding on barely in some of the thirteen local government areas that it still controls. The PNC could not even find candidates to compete in the majority of the 610 constituencies, being able to field candidates in merely 44% of all the constituencies in which local government elections were held. The PPP, on the other hand, for the first time in local government elections, fielded candidates in every single one of the constituencies, winning more than 75% of the seats. Of the five municipalities that the PPP traditionally win in, they held those with increasing majorities. The PPP now also control the municipalities of Mahdia and Bartica, two towns in Regions 7 and 8, both of which the PNC traditionally controlled. The PPP almost doubled its seats and more than doubled its votes in Georgetown. From one seat in Linden, the PPP now has two seats. The PPP nearly beat the PNC in New Amsterdam, where the PNC barely held on with an 8 to 6 seat distribution.
Examine the trajectory of elections in Guyana since 2018. PPP won more than 64% of all seats available in LGE 2018. The PPP won more than 51% of the votes in the March 2 general and regional elections. The PPP won more than 75% of all seats in the LGE 2023. What therefore would possess anyone to describe the PPP as a “now substantial minority party”? Somebody must have gone stark mad, or that someone is being dishonest. Maybe that someone is so filled with hate that he or she chooses to be a fool.
But while Henry Jeffrey treats us all as fools, we know that he is playing the fool. The truth is that his statement is not merely foolish, it is wicked and it is racist. He might be playing the fool, but we see what he is trying to do. What, in fact, he is getting at is that the PPP is nothing but an Indo-Guyanese party, and that the Indo-Guyanese population is now a minority in Guyana. While it might be true that the PPP is the party of choice for the majority of Indo-Guyanese, the PPP is also the party of choice for a significant majority of Amerindians, and the party of choice for a growing number of other ethnic groups in Guyana.
Outside of 1953, the PPP has never enjoyed more support from Afro-Guyanese than it presently enjoys. It is why the PNC knows that it cannot rely on winning New Amsterdam, which it has controlled since colonial days, either in the 2025 general elections or in the next LGE. It also knows that in the next general elections and in the next LGE, it might very well lose in Kwakwani for the first time.
There is a reason why the majority of young people, regardless of race, are now gravitating to the PPP. There is a reason why so many veteran politicians who have served the PNC all their lives have abandoned the PNC. It is because they see the PPP as growing from strength to strength; it is because they see the PNC as a sinking ship. Henry Jeffrey’s dishonesty is too transparent, and everyone sees it. It is nothing but racist rant hidden in some intellectual mumbo-jumbo.