Latest update April 24th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 20, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
The removal of Dr. Rupert Roopnarine as Minister of Education effectively reduces the coalition to five. The Working People’s Alliance has lost the only Ministry it had in the coalition and with it any leverage it would have had of influencing policy.
The Ministry of Education was the largest Ministry in the terms of budgetary expenditure. With the seizure of this Ministry, the PNC/R now controls the Ministries of Health, Communities, the Presidency, Public Service, Finance, Social Security, Education and Foreign Affairs. In terms of budgetary resources, the PNC/R now has a greater share of resources, within the government, than the AFC which has responsibility for Agriculture, public security and natural resources. The PNC/R becomes the top honcho within the government.
The WPA, for all intents and purposes has been booted from the government. Its members will try to desperately hold on to their jobs but this will come at the price of giving token support to the coalition.
The WPA has served its purpose. It was used to burnish the image of the PNC/R. It was used to create the illusion that there is a new PNC. If the party which once accused the PNC of assassinating one of its leaders could jump in bed with the PNC, then this clearly is a suggestion that the PNC/R is not the same as the old party which unleashed terror against the WPA in the late 1970s and 80s.
The WPA is no longer needed. It is being dumped. How else does one explain replacing a person with the ability and intelligence of Roopnarine with a junior Minister and splitting the education portfolio? If there were just reasons to remove the Minister of Education, then the replacement would have been different and there would have been no need to split the portfolio.
The leaders of the WPA are blind to this reality. They will grovel at the feet of the PNC/R. They will accept whatever crumbs are now thrown at them because they have allowed themselves to be seen as spent political force whose only value to the coalition was to boost the image of the PNC/R.
Like how the United Force was treated from 1964 to 1968, the WPA will find itself on the political sidelines. The other smaller parties in the coalition had better take note. The time is coming when they too will be dumped.
The reason is simple. The AFC is now equated with the PNC/R. The PNC/R has effectively managed to pull off a coup within the leadership of the AFC and now effectively controls that party.
The AFC was huffing and puffing recently about the need to renegotiate the Cummingsburg Accord. Well, it is not surprising that that issue has dropped off the political radar. The present leadership of the AFC will not push this further. They are comfortable with the status quo within the coalition where the AFC is now an extension of the PNC/R.
Electorally, the WPA cannot be equated with the AFC. The WPA has in recent years become something of a political heterotroph. It has attached itself to other parties in the hope of opportunistically gaining a political foothold in parliament. It was once in bed with the Guyana Action Party and then it joined with the PNC/R to form the APNU. It has run out of victims. It has now lost its political currency. It will be cast to the sidelines.
The AFC is often seen as the successor to the WPA. But this is a mistaken view. The WPA has never electorally enjoyed the sort of support which the AFC gained. The WPA’s leadership was traditionally part of the middle class but the party itself was a mass-based party which has strong working class support.
The WPA’s failure to contest the 1980 elections, which were the most farcical in Guyana’s history, cost it the opportunity to demonstrate that it has mass backing.
The AFC does not have the same origins as the WPA. The AFC is not a mass-based party. It is effectively an outlet for the middle class which emerged under the PPP and which needed a political vehicle.
The AFC is now indistinguishable from the PNC/R. The PNC/R has used the AFC to blur class lines. So even though the ruling coalition is now a coalition of five, it is effectively a coalition of four and will eventually become a party of one.
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