…or pot shots?
Henry Jeffrey is one of the founders of ANUG – one of the new parties on the block. But for some reason – which your Eyewitness has been unable to pin down – Jeffrey doesn’t seem to have any position in the surviving ANUG executive. (Several other worthies have since decamped). Was he struck by the mysterious illness that had brought down Raphael Trotman back in 2011, when Khemraj Ramjattan was slotted to be the AFC’s presidential candidate?? Is it possible that he too may have a miraculous recovery and show up after the elections, when appointed to a slot in the new administration??
Anyhow, Jeffrey’s been given to issuing some ponderous articles in the SN supporting his insistence that constitutional change mandating “shared governance” is the silver bullet that’ll destroy the dark ethnic, political forces sucking the blood out of our country. What has struck your Eyewitness with fellas like Jeffrey and their quick fixes is how they gloss over the elephant in the room. To wit, exactly how will they get the two political biggies to go along with their proposal to turn their political swords into cooperative ploughshares?
This was brought out by Jeffrey’s rather caustic riposte to PPP’s presidential candidate Irfaan Ali – who, like Jeffrey has a PhD – because the latter insisted before Guyana can have shared governance, there has to be “trust” engendered between the PNC and PPP. More precisely, Ali said, “We cannot have political trust and we cannot build political trust and we cannot have inclusion if we do not, first and foremost, respect this document that speaks to this which is the Constitution of our country.” Jeffrey dismissed this concern as “harping upon the old PPP/C mantra of the need to build trust and abide by/ uphold the Constitution.”
Now why would Jeffrey be dismissive of the PPP’s position? Is it an irrational one? As the co-author of a book on the Burnhamite PNC regime – and as a lecturer in their ideological school – has he forgotten that it’s in the institutional DNA of the PNC that they’d never SHARE real power with any other entity?? But we don’t have to go back to Burnham’s rejection of Jagan’s offer on PS back in the 1970s, do we??
Hasn’t he analysed and counted the ways in which Granger’s PNC flouted their “Accord” with the AFC to share power? Hasn’t he bemoaned the PNC’s refusal to PRACTICE power sharing when they cut the leg from under their AFC “partner” by unilaterally shuttering four sugar estates and firing 7000 workers – from where the latter had garnered strategic support??
Why should Ali and the PP trust the PNC to treat them differently??
…finally on sugar
GAWU massed its sugar workers at the Ministry of the Presidency to agitate for wage increases. They finally seemed to’ve realised the insightful wisdom of Fredrick Douglass – the great anti-slavery fighter: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.”
A word to Beneba…!
…to cut Guyana’s nose
On the Tacuba Lodge bloodletting seems that the sacked professional Director General had informed Granger about Minister Cummings and our UN Rep lobbying for the latter to chair the moribund “Group of 77”.
Granger agrees it’s worth US$1 million to boost the latter’s ego!
