In what has to be an unguarded moment, President David Granger, who has taken great pains to control his utterances by reading prepared speeches and has been criticised, for instance in not subjecting himself to a press conference with half his term completed, made some startling, spontaneous statements to a People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) overseas group in Atlanta, Georgia.
He revealed to the 5th Biennial Conference of the PNCR’s North American Region (NAR), for the very first time, that he had been a member of the PNC for some 52 years. This would mean he joined the PNC in 1965, the year he was sent as a 20-year old Queens College Cadet to the Mons Officer Cadet Training Course in England, even before he returned to Guyana to be commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the newly-formed Guyana Defence Force (GDF).
This factoid explains much of Mr Granger’s subsequent history, both in and out of the GDF. For instance, after the April 1970 aborted Army coup in Trinidad against the Eric Williams Government, Prime Minister and PNC leader Forbes Burnham rushed to ensure that the GDF did not go down that road. He launched an “Education Corps” to explicitly politicise the Army.
As documented in the GDF magazine, “Scarlet Beret Vol 1 #1; p54” Burnham’s declared to officers and new recruits of the GDF on October 26, 1970: “I do not share with the British the concept that the Army is separate and distinct from everything else and loyal to the government of the day. As Prime Minister, I expect you to be loyal to this Government. If there is any other government, it is a matter for you to decide about that, but as far as I am concerned I don’t want any abstract government.”
“I have now arranged with the Chief-of-Staff that, in future, all recruits, apart from their military training, will also have to attend a course of lectures on the philosophy and ideology of the Government and the Co-op Republic”. It had surprised some that the officer in charge of this PNC ideological training was the 25-year-old David Granger. That Granger was a card-carrying member of the party explains this trust by Burnham to designate him as the “Education Officer of the GDF in charge of the “Education Unit”. According to then Professor George Danns, “…the officer corps… all belonged to the Social, Political, and Economic Council (SPEC) which was set up by Minister of Information Elvin Mc David as a body for doing “backroom research” for the PNC.
On p72 of the magazine, Mc David explained the Army’s new role in greater detail: “The Education Unit is the People’s institution in the People’s Army charged with the task of establishing complete understanding of the new role. For it is to be successful, it will mean that it has to receive the support of the whole Army in a militant programme of political education of the people, regardless of whether it is in direct opposition groups whose roots are in traditional society and in whose interest it is to forestall the course of relevant development.”
The People’s Progressive Party, of course, was the major Opposition group “whose roots are in traditional society” – read “Indian society”, which was by definition “backward” and inevitably resistant to “relevant development”. This had always been Burnham’s position on the Indian Guyanese community as was elaborated in his book, A Destiny to Mould. Now that President Granger had confessed to being an un-reconstituted “Burnhamite”, this may explain his posture on sugar and rice.
And also explain the three questions President Granger posed to his Atlanta PNC audience: “You have to ask yourself how did the PNC gain office in 1964. Ask yourself how did the PNC remain in office and what did it do during that period. Ask yourself how the PNC regained office in 2015 and ask yourself how would the PNC retain office after 2020.”
