Latest update April 18th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jul 17, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Kaieteur News – There is a cowardly political document going around. It is purported to be composed by a number of executive committee members of the PNC denouncing the one-man hegemony of David Granger as PNC leader.
This discovery was made too late. It is a discovery all right but it amounts to a waste of time. History has left the PNC behind. The PNC will be in a comatose electoral state for decades to come because that discovery should have been searched for long before 2021.
For the antecedents we have to go back to the PPP in 2010. The PPP took a horrible beating from the semi-fascism of Forbes Burnham. Under Burnham, fascism first came to the English-speaking Caribbean. The world of sadistic politics that Burnham brought to the CARICOM family was so bestial that when he died only one CARICOM head came to Burnham’s mausoleum in the Botanic Garden for the funeral service.
After more than three decades of fighting Burnham’s demonic absolutism, the PPP with its globally respected leader, Cheddi Jagan, won state power. You would have thought that after securing power, the PPP would never look back. It threw away what it deserved. It chose the wrong candidate in Donald Ramotar in the 2011 election. It did not learn from 2011. It went back with the same person in 2015. It lost again.
Only Ralph Ramkarran went public with his frustration in the 2011 selection process. I am not a fan of Ramkarran and never will be, but I think he would have won it for the PPP in 2011. Lady luck embraced the PPP. It came back to power. One would like to think it will frenetically learn from history’s wrong pathways.
Enter President Granger. From the time he became president, Granger showed a lack of familiarity with the requirements a leader must adhere to in West Indian politics. Compared with Burnham, Hoyte, the two Jagans, Sam Hinds, Bharrat Jagdeo and Ramotar, there was something conspicuously missing in Granger – he didn’t understand Guyanese politics, Guyanese people and the role of a leader in a particular environment.
In this milieu to have a man like this running a one-man show was a tsunamic disaster in the making. You internalise lessons living in this tragic land every day. The only reason why I will not name this long-standing powerhouse in the PNC (I am not referring to Hamilton Green) is because he may sue. But during the reign of Granger, he said to me something he thought was a terrible mistake by Granger. He said, “Leh he try deh, he’s de leader.” He was actually saying no one in the PNC can reject a fatal misdirection of the president.
As we came to 2018, long before the no-confidence vote, the APNU+AFC was performing in dull, unexciting ways that a one-term prediction began to haunt its intellectual supporters. I know this because they talk to me frankly about it. I spoke candidly about a one-term scenario with many well-placed friends in the AFC. The conspicuous alarm was the persona of President Granger.
There was an opposition and it was led by a man who was president for 12 years. He saw the abysmal performance of Granger. As president for 12 years, Bharrat Jagdeo knew that Granger was APNU+AFC and APNU+AFC will not survive with that kind of presidential mediocrity. He went in for the kill. He needed just 5,000 votes to win the 2020 election. He knew he had more than that.
One mistake after another Granger made as president. His budget minister was living in another world and so was the boss of the budget minister. Things were falling apart, paradise was ebbing, great expectations were dying but no one in the PNC challenged President Granger because he was the Leviathan.
The people who signed that document that are calling for the ouster of Granger could have been in power today only if they had discovered in 2017 what they found in July 2021. So terrible was Granger’s performance after 2015 that rigging the national election became the PNC’s deus-ex-machina. The discoverers of July 2021 went along with their Leviathan.
But you don’t rig an election for five months. You do it in five hours or maybe five days. But five months is so stupid that the world will maul you. And the world mauled those very discoverers of July 2021 and their Leviathan, David Granger. Now they want their boss to be removed. But what will the PNC achieve in ousting Granger? If Granger was confronted in 2016, the APNU+AFC may have stood a chance in 2020. The rest is history.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)
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