In all the ‘tempest in a teacup’ about a coalition between the Opposition parties to “remove the PPP from office”, it looks like the micro “parties” – which helped the PNC convince a gullible few that the PNC had disappeared into APNU – have disappeared into thin air!!
It would seem that things have never been the same after they kept on inviting Aubrey Norton to meetings – after General Secty “Lil Joe” Harmon had decamped, along with the Sanctimonious Gangster, subsequent to their being booted out from the PNC leadership – and he never showed up.
So, last June, Keith Scott of the National Front Alliance (NFA); Vincent Henry of the Guyana Action Party (GAP); Jaipaul Sharma, Leader of the Equal Rights and Justice Party (ERJP); and Tabitha Sarabo-Halley, Leader of the Guyana Nation Builders (GNB), duly gathered and elected Vincent Henry as the Chairman of APNU. Norton went ballistic, and immediately pointed out that, with no APNU Gen Secty, the meeting had no standing, and its actions were irrelevant – and he was still Chairman of APNU!!
Lo and behold, six months later, it was announced that the APNU execs had met at Congress Place under the chairmanship of Norton, and they were gonna pursue coalition politics for the upcoming elections. Norton had obviously heeded the African proverb that says, “A wise old man only gives his walking stick to someone from whom he can take it back”!!
That Sarabo-Halley and Jaipaul Sharma were absent from this conclave suggests they might’ve been behind the palace coup to oust Norton, and they weren’t getting no walking sticks!! But this brings us back to the point your Eyewitness raised at the beginning – especially now that we know coalition-building was the raison d’etre for their kiss-and-make-up January meet!!
So, what does this tell us about the state of play between Norton’s PNC and Hughes’s AFC in their hold-me-loose-me coalition “negotiations”?? Clearly, that Norton goes by the other party’s willingness to accept that he’s Numero Uno before he starts handing out walking sticks!! And the AFC – for reasons that your Eyewitness can’t really fathom – made it clear from the word go that Norton ain’t even being considered for Number TWO!! They even suggested a wildcard with absolutely NO political background save being Coloured to rub in Norton’s cultural background!!
Now, why in the world did they ever think Norton would go for that?? For the greater good – which the AFC couldn’t seriously consider they could deliver, unless they were smoking some serious crack??!!
So, it would appear that Norton’s gonna lead the PNC-as-APNU against the PPP come this November-at-latest elections!! If for nothing else, he’s gonna show Guyana “goat ent bite ‘e”!!
…to enjoying peace??
You’d think that, with almost sixty years of governing ourselves as an independent nation, we’d start enjoying the stability that was promised by going democratic. But here we are, still buffeted by conflicts that used to play out in street-corner cuss-outs; but we’re now torn apart over social media platforms, and ever so often we erupt into violence. Where the heck did we go wrong??
Forget all the theory about democratic peace; there’s our own post-independence EXPERIENCE, for which we couldn’t throw the blame on the Brits!! Did the riots of the sixties lead to progress? Did the killings of the early 2000s and all that happened in between, like the “kick down the door” banditry, do any better?
One of the reasons offered is that we were so po’ we had to be fighting to get a morsel. But we now got enough money – even with our 14.5% of the oil revenues – to soon give more than a morsel to everyone. So, could we simmer down?
