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Nov 20, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Two men, Laurence Williams and Tameswhar Lilmohan, living in a beautiful country – Canada- woke up one day, ran out of their respective bedrooms onto their respective snow filled lawns and shouted out, “Eureka, Eureka.” The neighbours did not summon the police but instead called the attendants from Toronto’s psychiatry institution.
There was no further action because Williams and Lilmohan explained to the men in white gowns that they were not losing their marbles but were simply shouting out their discovery about Guyanese politics.
And what did they discover? That the party, the AFC, they backed to remove the PPP may not be much different in political culture from the PPP, that this party fooled them and all those who supported and campaigned for them including this columnist. But this apocalypse by Williams and Lilmohan does not and should not make them good guys in the eyes of Guyanese, wherever Guyanese are.
Two weeks ago Williams and Lilmohan (Dem Boys Seh will no doubt refer to these two as Willy and Lilly) broke with the AFC over their party’s support for Granger’s unilateral appointment of a GECOM Chairman. But where were Willy and Lilly living the past two and a half years when the AFC had long descended into the vortex of power inebriation?
Why only now the discovery when the flow of political degeneracy by the AFC the past thirty six months was as strong as that of Niagara Falls in Canada where they live; assuming that Willy and Lilly ever saw Niagara Falls.
It first started days after the election results. The AFC hierarchy gathered in their head office to assign ministries. A couple of leaders picked up the phone and asked one of their middle class friends (a woman with a doctorate in an agriculture related subject) if she would accept the portfolio within the Ministry of Environment. When I heard that I was not only livid but drowning in the philosophical consciousness of Guyana’s existential nihilism.
There were AFC activists with good university degrees that laboured in the trenches to bring about the election results of 2015 and these people were contemptuously shut out for someone who never lifted even a finger to campaign for the AFC.
Going through the list of political parties, and their leaders that I know of, I couldn’t see that happening. Not Cheddi Jagan of the PPP; not Forbes Burnham of the PNC, not Balram Singh Rai of the Justice Party; not Peter D’Aguiar of the United Force, not Brindley Benn of the Workers’ Vanguard Party; not Llewellyn John of the People’s Democratic Movement, not Walter Rodney of the WPA; not Paul Tennassee of the DLM, not Ravi Dev of ROAR; not Manzoor Nadir of TUF
To win an election and just call someone outside of your party and offer them a ministry is unheard of in this country. I saw this as political immorality of the worst kind, so I did a column exposing the AFC’s moral bankruptcy. In an email to me which I have retained, the then General-Secretary, David Patterson acknowledged the decision to offer the Ministry but said it was a campaign promise to award a seat to civil society. But who decided that the lady was from civil society? AFC insiders told me that there was no such promise.
Where were Willy and Lilly when the AFC issued a press release insulting Dr. David Hinds and told him that he should be grateful for the post 2015 freedoms he now enjoys? Hinds replied and accused the AFC of being power drunk.
Where were Willy and Lilly when an AFC leader said that based on my criticism of the AFC, it looks like I want to have the PPP back in power? That was insulting to me but this was Guyana where nothing makes sense
The WPA overseas group is like Willy and Lilly. This group which styles itself as “Overseas Friends of the WPA,” never asks its home-based sister organisation to explain the silence of its leaders who are in government on crucial issues like Tacuma Ogunseye’s revelations that the WPA’s representative in the government, Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine’s stance that he cannot discuss government’s business with the WPA.
So doesn’t the WPA discuss with its representative in the Cabinet, the things it wants to see become policies? One would like to think that election politics is about a party winning power and turning into reality its agenda. Isn’t that what winning an election is about? Did this WPA overseas group ventilate its positions on the many reticent moments of the WPA when Government went into ugly directions? I guess not.
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‘The AFC and WPA overseas groups are hypocrites’
What is your role by this and most of your such articles?
Secret defender of the Alliance Government?
Why you don’t want anyone to embarrass the Alliance Gov’t?