The WPA has become a “nonexistent” hypocrite

Oct 22, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I was never in love with the political movements that were founded to fight against colonialism, post-colonial autocracy, race discrimination, human rights violations, bad governance etc. I joined and was active because there was a higher goal. I participated and made personal sacrifices because of higher dreams, the dreams of liberating the poor and powerless. I came from that class in Wortmanville in South Georgetown.
I know what race discrimination, colour prejudice, economic deprivation, class snobbery, denied opportunities, police intransigence, democratic violations are. I have seen them all while growing up in Wortmanville with two very poor parents and six siblings. I joined the bandwagons each time one passed my way. I wanted to fight for poor people. But I was never impressed with the leadership of those broad social forces that I was part of.
Many of those leaders I simply disliked or to put it more harshly, I never could have respected and put my faith in. They were not good-hearted people. Throughout my political career I have named many of them. I don’t care. As the editor of this newspaper is wont to say; “I don’t take my plate to them.”
I have also named many individuals in those movements that I came to admire. Their names are scattered in the thousands of columns I have written since 1988. My instinct worked in the direction of individuals, not the movement itself. For that reason I never held a party card in all my life. I spoke at more political meetings than any other AFC leader during the 2015 election campaign. I am not an AFC member, will not join and have nothing in common with the ideological anatomy of the AFC. The AFC is essentially a middle class entity; I see nothing wrong with that. My preference is for working class parties that have open pro-working class agendas and dreams.
This is a long preface to the point I want to get at and that is the fictions the remnants of WPA are perpetuating on the Guyanese people. Each time I write a political assessment of the moribund WPA, Tacuma Ogunseye replies and performs a task that appears quite dishonest. He focuses on me; the messenger. He most blatantly ignores the contents, the manifest points in my message. In yesterday’s issue of KN, he was at it again. It is always about Freddie Kissoon and not the physiology of the WPA. He ignores the questions I raise about the existence of the WPA. He will do it again.
David Hinds joined Ogunseye and penned a Chronicle column on my contention that the WPA is virtually dead. But as in the myriad of replies to me by Ogunseye, there was no elongation of my main polemical point about the demise of the WPA. There is a weekly Chronicle article by David but there is no mention of the quintessential life of the WPA in government and the role the WPA plays in Government. Are Ogunseye and David so assured that they believe Guyanese accept the WPA is alive and is part of the policy-making of the APNU+AFC regime?
Here are three simple absurdities from the world of the WPA. One is from Ogunseye. In response to my opinion that the Coalition is faltering, he observed; “The WPA sees it as its responsibility to do everything in its power to halt the slide.” What power the WPA has and who is the WPA? And what strategies and mechanisms it inserts into governance structures to “halt the slide.”
Secondly, Ogunseye went public and wrote that the WPA’s representative in Cabinet has refused to report on Cabinet decisions to the WPA. This is unheard of in the history of coalition politics anywhere in the world. Yet David could see it fit to write on the political deportment of the AFC but cannot pen a line on that outrageous position of Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine. The third example is from a body calling itself, WPA Overseas Friends. It published a long letter in the Stabroek News detailing the WPA’s position in the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy in the 70s and 80s. Why go back so long? Why not write on the WPA’s position in the Government of Guyana of which it is a part.
I would never deny the phenomenally great role of the WPA in the seventies of which I played my little small part. But this is what the WPA has come to forty years after? Do the remnants of the WPA seriously think that the Guyanese population believes that it is a force within the corridors of power? Really! What is Rodneyism?

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