Remembering… Robert Corbin

In the grand scheme of things, your Eyewitness believes “when you gotta go, you gotta go” – and so he views with equanimity that it was time for Robert Horatio Orlando (RHO) Corbin to go. And in accordance with the maxim that we were inculcated with as good colonials – de mortuis nil, nisi bonnum (of the dead say only the good) may he rest in peace (RIP).
RHO – as your Eyewitness is used to calling him – lived a long and checkered life almost totally dominated and eventually consumed with Guyanese politics!! He was born in the bauxite mining town – before it was a town – and was sixteen when the infamous Wismar massacre and the equally infamous Son Chapman explosion were orchestrated in 1964. These events had to’ve had a massive impact on him since– as a social worker, believe it or not! – he soon joined the PNC’s Young Socialist Movement (YSM) in which he moved inexorably to become its leader.
Cutting his eyeteeth in the heady days of the rigging of the 1968, 1973 and 1980 elections, he emerged as one of the Kabaka’s most trusted lieutenants to became an indispensable cog in this PNC wheel that Burnham had introduced to keep his party in power and the PPP looking in from the outside!! He was rewarded with a succession of influential party and ministerial posts which pointed to the likelihood that he might one day lead the PNC – and perhaps even snag the presidency!! As such, when the Kabaka passed in 1985 and Desmond Hoyte became his surprising heir, he tied his wagon firmly to the Silver Fox’s tail in the 1985 elections – and gave the latter a bigger majority that even Burnham had ever given himself!!
As Hoyte moved to remove the Burnhamite wing of the PNC and introduce a set of new faces – like Trotman – to form the PNC-Reform, Corbin was rewarded with a Deputy PM post to hold-off the restive Hamilton Green!! He was snagged in the infamous Power Barge scandal that makes the opposition’s present critique of the PPP’s power-ships seem like a tempest in a teapot!! Desmond Hoyte’s passing catapulted him into the leadership of the PNC in early 2003 – but he soon received stiff internal opposition from two quarters – one from old guards like Vincent Alexander challenging him from within – and Trotman quitting and challenging him from the newly-formed AFC.
He moderated and pushed the PPP to consider shared governance – but when this foundered – his first election as PNC leader in 2006 was disasterour as the AFC pulled six seats from the PNC’s base.
He could never recover and in 2011 stepped aside for David Granger to lead the APNU coalition he’d brokered.
He did it his way!!

…Oct 5th
It’s rather ironic that RHO passed on the eve of Oct 5th – the day that his PNC was ousted because the US that had backstopped the PNC’s riggings now thought that Jagan was a toothless lion in winter and could be brought in from the cold!! Pres Carter’s intervention had neutralized RHO’s greatest utility to the PNC in one fell swoop – to cook the ballots – and even Hamilton Green’s last hurrah at GECOM’s HQ was fruitless!!
Yes…it was a great day for democracy – but we don’t see the PNC celebrating, do we?? They’d tried a thing (from the past) in 2020 but all it did was to earn RHO’s chosen successor Granger – who’d proved the former’s instincts correct that a kinder gentler PNC could capture the presidency!! – the title of Sanctimonious Gangster!!
Granger decided to walk and we now have a PNC decimated even worse than in 2006 from an unexpected quarter – Sanction Man!!
Democracy’s great innit?? It spontaneously generates the changes that make it work!!

…our southern neighbour
Because of Venezuela’s decades long belligerency in claiming two thirds of our Western national territory, we sometimes forget to look South!! There, Lula’s seemingly invincibility has been punctured by right-wing Bolsanaro in their presidential sweepstakes!! Implications??