…and the US
It’s now public that the PNC hired a Washington lobbyist firm since March 31, to influence the US specifically as it relates to the PNC-led coalition’s frantic efforts to head off threatened sanctions for its barefaced attempt to rig the March elections. Now, the US has a long institutional memory involving the PNC – going back to 1961, during the Cold War, when their interest was stopping communism in Guyana. That the PNC has to hire lobbyists to cover its tracks is the clearest indication that their relations have gone waay south!
Back in the ‘60s, after all, declassified US documents show that Burnham had directly informed the US Ambassador of his intention to rig the 1968 elections!! The latter even suggested that voting machines be introduced which could (literally) do the trick!! Burnham, of course, wanted to do it his way, to ensure that the PNC institutionalise rigging with a cadre of locals, starting with the appointment of Desmond Hoyte to the Elections Commission. Even as he created an NRR, that’s a source of rigging attempts to this day!!
Folks believe that the US changed its position on the PPP returning to office just because of the fall of the Soviet communist empire. Yes, but it was also influenced by the PNC’s having its cake and eating it too at the Americans’ expense, after 1970, when they nationalised Reynolds Bauxite and kicked out Chase Manhattan Bank; and proceeded to cosy up with Cuba to trans-ship their troops to Angola. An American invasion of Guyana after Grenada was missed by a whisker, only after Thatcher was miffed at not being consulted by Reagan.
During the PPP years, the PNC always assumed that the relations with the US from the sixties were still intact. Just before the 2011 elections, a bunch of PNC-aligned academics – led by Ivelaw Griffith – put out a document claiming that the “Strategic Culture” of the PNC was more aligned with that of the US than the PPP’s was. They forgot the maxim of realpolitik that advised there are no permanent friends among nations – just permanent interests. And if US interests coincided with a new PPP, wherein all the old-timers from the sixties were now retired to pasture, the PNC had no transport on their support. As US Ambassador Carol-Ann Lynch said after the PNC persisted with its crude rigging, “The United States Government is entirely non-partisan about which party wins Guyana’s 2020 elections.”
The PNC is barking up the wrong tree. The US isn’t about to discard the personal observations on the elections by their Ambassador, the UK, Canada, the EU, the OAS;
and for good measure, CariCom.
…and party paramountcy
In its grandiosely named “Declaration of Sophia” in 1974, when Burnham defined the PNC party as “socialist”, he declared: “It was also decided that the Party should assume unapologetically its paramountcy over the Government, which is merely one of its executive arms.” Granger, one of Burnham’s protégés, who along with Elvin McDavid had organised the National Service, was then tasked with imparting Burnham’s vision encapsulated in the Declaration to the army.
In what can now be called the “Declaration of Pearl”, Granger has now signalled that the “paramountcy” of the PNC over the Government is now back with a vengeance. Do you remember Harmon – who’s GS of APNU – letting slip that he’d gotten a call from a GECOM clerk on the night of the infamous spreadsheets and missing flash drive with SOPs data? So much for GECOM’s “autonomy”!! And, of course, there’s PNC Chair Volda Lawrence’s just-as-infamous utterance that she has “wuk only for her PNC friends” in the Ministry of Health!!
And the icing on the cake is the Government paying the lobbyist to shill for APNU in Washington, and who it represents.
The PNC must think the Americans are simpletons and racists. Imagine, they expect to be favoured by the US Govt by claiming they represent, in the following order, “Europeans, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-Guyanese, Mixed, and Indo-Guyanese”!!
