PPP suffers another panic attack

Dec 09, 2012 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

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Ralph Ramkarran published a nearly five thousand-word thesis entitled “The PPP and the challenges ahead” last Sunday. The article appeared quite coincidentally, only one day before the first anniversary of Donald Ramotar’s inauguration as President on December 3, 2011.
Ramkarran skillfully contrived a partial diagnosis of the symptoms of latest panic attack to afflict the People’s Progressive Party but ignored the real causes of the disease that aggravated the anxiety and deepened the dread within the ruling party.
The PPP last suffered from a similar panic attack on New Year’s Day 2010, the party’s auspicious 60th anniversary. A group of concerned members and supporters then published a full-page advertisement entitled “Open Appeal to Leaders and Members of the PPP” in a daily newspaper. The authors of the ‘Appeal’ claimed, among other things, to be concerned that the PPP’s hard core was being marginalised and that the “new private sector” was becoming dominant and “all-powerful”.
The fact is that the last twelve years have witnessed the emergence of a “new private sector” to which this advertisement referred.  That sector has become part of the elected oligarchy– simply, the rule of the country by a few persons. The oligarchy is made up of some high-ranking party members, comprador capitalists, selected members of civil society and certain Government officials especially in the security sector.
It uses its control over state resources, the state media and the law-enforcement agencies to consolidate its control of the state itself and to concentrate more power in its hands.
It then directs state contracts into the hands of its cronies who accumulate enormous amount of wealth while the masses remain impoverished. A few gold and diamond miners, big contractors, rich rice farmers and comprador capitalists close to the PPP are able to prosper. The bulk of public servants, policemen, nurses, soldiers, teachers, sugar workers, rice workers and mining workers are still underpaid and under pressure to make ends meet.
Ramkarran is aware that the PPP’s post-Jagan policy agenda has gone off the rails.  He does admit that the Party’s fraternal association with the working class has declined, most spectacularly with the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers’ Union – GAWU – representing sugar workers, which it even threatened with de-recognition.
He does not admit that the greedy ‘oligarchy’ to which the Party gave birth and continues to nourish is a big part of the problem.
Ramkarran studiously does not deal with the rise and role of the ‘oligarchy’ and with the issues afflicting the majority of the population. He seemed more concerned with reaffirming his lifelong love of the PPP’s pseudo-socialist politics and ethnic electoral tactics.  He was inclined to propose remedies to enable Ramotar and his party to hold on to power.
His focus was not on repairing the damage the PPP has inflicted on the country over the past twenty years.  It was all about deciding how best that party could burnish its image to remain in power for the next twenty years.
Ramkarran, in so doing, has diagnosed the wrong disease. He sees the elections as an ethnic census and, mistakenly, seeks a remedy in racial politics. He seems to suggest that the cause of the PPP’s electoral defeat was the decreasing size of the Indian-Guyanese population – now estimated to be below 40 per cent –which is the source of the Party’s “core support.”
By focusing on Indian-Guyanese ethnic electoral support, he displayed an amazing absence of objectivity and departure from reality.
Ramkarran does not seem to understand that the real reason for the PPP’s predicament is not its ethnic arithmetic.  He therefore has no idea about what to do to avoid the logical outcome of the loss of political confidence by the public. Contrary to the Ramkarran’s declarations, the PPP’s main failure has actually been the loss of “trust and confidence,” even among its staunch supporters.
This loss of trust and confidence was triggered by rampant corruption; everyday armed robberies; banditry in the hinterland; murderous maritime piracy; fuel-smuggling; gun-running; contraband smuggling; backtracking that rages along the coastland and, not least, by the PPP’s tolerance of  Guyana’s most notorious narco-trafficker – Shaheed ‘Roger’ Khan – and the phantom gangs that wreaked havoc during the troubles.
The source of the PPP’s difficulties is much more profound and much more problematic than Ramkarran cares to recount. The party finds itself being rejected by society because it has repudiated the very institutions on which democratic society depends. Its socialism was never about empowering working people to enable them to prosper.
It was always a form of social authoritarianism by which the PPP expected to preside over the common people in perpetuity.
The PPP, in twenty years, has sidelined important constitutional organs such as the Ombudsman and the Public Service Appellate Tribunal which provided assurances to the public and protection from executive lawlessness. It reduced the Parliament Office and several constitutional offices to docile departments under the executive.
It undermined the independence of the Public Service. It choked regulatory and law-enforcement agencies – the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Guyana Energy Agency – of assets, equipment, financing and personnel to such an extent as to impair their ability to function effectively.
The PPP still crudely attempts to manipulate public opinion through the Government Information Agency, the National Communications Network and the Guyana National Newspapers Ltd from which dissenting views are excluded and which have increasingly become propaganda agencies of the PPP.
The cost of the degradation of national institutions during the Jagdeo era has been intolerably high but Ramkarran chose to avoid mentioning anything whatsoever about that. The PPP, if it is to start to transform Guyana into a modern democratic state, must dismantle the ‘oligarchy’, reject ethnic elections, respect the National Assembly and rebuild our national institutions.

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