Latest update March 18th, 2024 12:59 AM
Sep 22, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
The Chronicle caption reads as follows; “AFC urges PPP to go back to Parliament to extend life of government.” That item was a reporting from the press conference of the AFC held last Friday.
At the press meeting, AFC’s leader Khemraj Ramjattan explicitly called for the life of the government to be extended. But here is what Dominic Gaskin had to say that every Guyanese needs to reflect on if Guyana is going to avoid a pathway of instability.
Let’s quote what the Chronicle reported Gaskin as saying; “Why would they (PPP) not want to grant a parliamentary extension and risk the country being exposed to all sorts of interpretations as to the legality of the government and all of that? Why would any responsible political party knowing the circumstances, want to place our country in such an unfavourable position by not granting the extension based now on GECOM’s earliest possible elections date?”
In which part of the world and when in the history of the modern world, has an opposition party generously and willingly extended the life of its adversary in government without negotiations on a modus vivendi? Not only the AFC housed a press conference and pleaded with the PPP to vote for an extension of government, but the tiny, WPA made the identical advocacy at its own press conference the same day the AFC had its own.
Now either the people at the top of the AFC are insanely stupid or sickeningly ignorant. Whichever description you go for, this plea is so crazy that it will not materialize, because politicians do not behave the way the AFC leaders want the PPP to do.
The AFC will know that, because as politicians they wanted power just as badly as the PPP did, and still want power after 2020 just as badly as the PPP wants it. They have become intoxicated with power just the way the PPP did when the PPP acquired office, so the power-inebriates in the AFC are foolishly parading themselves as clowns in the eyes of the nation. What the AFC and WPA want is only found in comic books.
Is Mr. Gaskin telling us that on Tuesday, the House is called into session, the PPP, the AFC and APNU vote for a two-thirds resolution extending the life of the government and that is it? Is Mr. Gaskin telling Guyanese that after that vote in the House, it is alright for opposition supporters to open the Chronicle and see the front pages filled with news of APNU activities in PNC strongholds, but none on the activities of the PPP and other opposition parties?
I am pointedly asking AFC and WPA leaders if it is morally right for NCN next week to be featuring interviews with AFC and PNC leaders extolling their “achievements” the past four years, but there are no such interviews with PPP leaders? Should that not engender an emotional tsunami in PPP constituencies? Are these constituencies not going to say; “Why our party kept them in government so they can do this to us?”
The question that needs to be put to the AFC is; “are you willing to sit down with the PPP and shape the form of governance until the next election before you get to Parliament?” If the PNC and AFC will not go in that direction, then anyone who endorses a parliamentary extension of the life of government does that live in the real world and should not be allowed to live among rational humans.
It is not a question of whether you like or dislike the PPP. It is what obtains in human nature. Why does any supporter of the PNC and AFC think the PPP is going to allow the PNC and AFC to run the nation’s affairs, make policies, use their state to patronize their support base, and not ask for anything in return?
Why do such supporters think that the very people on the ground that do the “brukking up” for the PPP, will accept their leaders giving the government without asking to be given things too? That is not politics, not human nature, not the real world.
In my Friday column, I advocated that both sides should acknowledge the existence of realpolitik in politics and negotiate an arrangement that would not leave the voters from both sides feeling that their leaders let them down.
At this time, reasonable people have to understand that Guyana is in the election campaign season, and how the PPP reacts to the ruling regime and the type of offers the ruling regime makes to the PPP can lead to alienation of their respective voters. So there has to be a modus vivendi.
Listen to the man that is throwing Guyanese bright future away
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