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Nov 11, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
I would say three momentous episodes were poised to enable this country to have a stable, optimistic future with a place in the sun for all citizens, their children and the next generation. They are – the Rodney phenomenon to check immediate post-colonial authoritarian directions; the arrival of Cheddi Jagan and his tried and tested PPP into power in 1992 and the remarkable embrace the AFC got from the population from 2006 onwards.
All three ended up as horrible, tragic failures. It would take a lengthy manuscript to analyze the failure of each. Here are tiny notes on the sordid transformation of a party that brought hope and ended up in the politics of degeneration as the 2018 LGE testifies to. Can we have another Rodney ambience and another AFC styled entity?
The answer is yes. History is a stream that dictates its own flow. Zeitgeists come and go and sometimes they return. The question is how long before another Rodney comes, how long before the birth of another type of AFC. There can be a plausible prediction but it is based on the situation on the ground.
For example, the scenario prevailing in the US does not lend to the emergence of another Obama or a sweeping victory for the Democrats.
In Guyana, reactionary, backward politics has entrenched itself that dwarfs the contents of the Burnham and Jagan governments. I have lived through the reign of both men and I was inflexible on my rejection of the nature of Burnham’s rule and on Jagan’s visionless perspectives but what I see in Guyana after the fall of the Jagdeo/Ramotar hegemony desponds me immensely.
I contend that the Burnham and Jagan administrations were discernibly less insensitive to the reckless and banal use of power we see in post 2015 Guyana. I spent 26 consecutive years at UG fighting to make it a better place and if anyone would have said to me that after the fall of the two PPP regimes (Jagdeo and Ramotar), UG would have a more authoritarian culture I would have shouted them down.
Everywhere you look in Guyana, you see the faces of resignation and pessimism. The joy of a post 2015 future has died. Oil or no oil unless we get visionary, transformative leadership, this tragic land will not see the exit sign on the cemetery gate. The AFC is just another manifestation of the birth and death of hope.
The statistics of Monday’s LGE results tell a huge story of a dream that went badly astray. Not since Rodney had the nation witnessed a chance to confront and remove racist suspicion, racial animosity and racial fear with the birth of the AFC. I was part of those circumstances. I was there to see the electrifying moments the AFC brought to Guyana.
The tired minds, burdened with the permanent presence of the PPP and PNC, were unburdened. The young, too young to see and know what the PPP and PNC did, didn’t want to know. They just accepted that there was a third party that wasn’t exclusively for Indians and Africans in this country.
The AFC went from strength to strength then straight into power. Then the Faustian journey began. The mileage dissolved the optimism of the citizenry. The Rodney phenomenon died because immediate post-colonial Guyana was too complicated for both Rodney and Burnham to understand. The Cheddi Jagan arrival was indeed enigmatic. He meant so much to a nation that knew him for so long but he succumbed to Guyana’s curse – the race monster.
The AFC superstar performance crashed because they succumbed to civilization’s most potent poison – the power brew that enticed Macbeth. This article would not be complete if some brief LGE 2018 statistics are not given to show the extent of the impact with which the AFC’s plane crash landed in the bowels of the Atlantic Ocean.
Of 14,886 valid votes cast in Region Five, the AFC got 270. That is 1.8 percent. Of 261 seats contested in 18 NDCs and three municipalities in Region Six, the AFC got one solitary seat. Of the 38 Local Government Authorities the AFC contested (out of 88 in the entire country), the AFC did not win one.
Disgracefully, it did not even come in second in any of those 38 contests. In the birthplace of the Prime Minister in Whim in Region Six, the AFC secured a mere ten percent of the votes. The story for the AFC is the same all over Guyana. The AFC did not get even one seat in the Lethem municipality. The AFC came and went.
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