Dear Editor,
Suddenly, as another snowy day dawns, it comes to me that my understanding of today’s politics in Guyana may be deficient.
It had always been my view that the reasons that the PNC is not in power, had more to do with immigration policy during the colonial era than the abilities or policies of its leadership.
PNC supporters were simply outnumbered, and the party chose, during its very first term, to continue with an electoral system that ensured that the winner took all. It only had to ensure that it named itself winner. Which it duly did. Then, in its socialist-revolutionary phase, it declared itself a vanguard party, without going the full length and constitutionally entrenching itself eternally. Then, when the call for free and fair elections sounded its knell, it mistakenly persuaded itself that it had a chance and failed to prepare a system of mandatory shared government. A party which had, in its mis-reading of the politics, doomed itself to the opposition benches and the indignities and attendant demoralisation that we now witness.
The sycophants and fellow travellers drifted off, the overly ambitious stalked out in frustration, the dissidents found other pastures. The fact that the party started a new life in opposition in seeming confusion – the violent marches, the flirtation with violent gangs, if true, the inability to persuade the nation that it had repented (despite the countless public declarations) and the unceasing challenges to the leadership, reveal a party that is still now finding itself. The role it should play in opposition, welfare organisation for its membership, which is all it can do out of power and with its few resources, seemed not to have been well seized. It perhaps still suffers from the delusion that it can win elections. At least some supporters do. Otherwise it occupies itself in agitating for power-sharing. There is no other solution.
This has been my understanding. But now, I am hearing that most of it is Mr Corbin’s fault. The opposition leader, whom I remember as a loyal and assiduous activist and functionary, is somehow portrayed as the millstone that will plunge the party into the depths of the abyss. And that so-and-so, replacing him and taking to the streets will force an “arrogant and insensitive” PPP to do things better. That he is at best, bereft of vision and militancy.
The criticism of Mr Corbin’s leadership has now become an insistent din that cannot be ignored. Commentators whose acuity I trust, such as Chris Ram, have joined the call for Mr Corbin to resign. Activists in whose integrity I have confidence, such as Stanley Ming, have withdrawn. But somehow I fail to convince myself that the problem is Mr Corbin or that an alternative leadership will secure better electoral results. Perhaps it will give comfort and hope to some. The change of leadership serving the same psychological ends as the marching did. Proving that something is being done. That some sort of change is happening. But the case for change has not been convincingly made and one fears a return to the chaos of the past.
First I must confess my concerns about ‘Team Alexander.’ When people were being beaten in the streets Mr Alexander was quoted as dismissing the indecency as mere “interactions” of the sort necessary to the forward movement the country needed. That the PPP is recalcitrant. Responding only to fire and sword. This may have been the party line at the time but to my mind this was terrible public relations. But in any case it perturbed.
Then the ceaseless pre-congress sniping in the press, after the party had experienced the acrimonious departure of Raphael Trotman, and had been severely criticised for its over-reliance on the kind of public demonstration which Benschop and Bynoe now disavow, suggested that many in Team Alexander were not themselves convinced that the party had really been sold on internal democracy. This was a very bad comment on the state of the party from insiders themselves. This was not reassuring for the nation. And the way elections were managed at the congress confirmed the country’s worst fears. The PNC was the proverbial egg-sucking dog. Incorrigible. Incapable of reform.
Second, Team Alexander did not convincingly make its case. What exactly, apart from a more militant and super-mobilised party, were they calling for? It all seemed to resolve itself as a public quarrel over strategy at a time when most of Guyana was tired and frightened of the indiscipline and violence that finally only gave a bad name to the party and supporters.
Campaigning on a platform of higher fire, Team Alexander, put it to us that Corbin and unnamed persons in the hierarchy were conspiring to defuse, to dampen, to demoralise. One was not convinced. The charge that the opposition leader had been somehow co-opted by President Jagdeo, or that he had made a Faustian bargain with some PPP elements to support a third term in exchange for this or that, or that he had sold supporters out for a handful of silver, seemed, to say the least, to spring from a fevered imagination. Besides, the one thing we learn from our history is that, as in the case of the WPA, the people being killed and jailed and beaten are not necessarily the prime beneficiaries of the political results of the struggle.
Should there be a need for better organisation of the party, I am certain that the mechanisms exist to achieve this in the circumstances. A strategy to deal with the AFC that recognises exactly which segment of the supporters it had captured (and these were not the burners, beaters and rioters) and seeks to win them back, could also be debated. But to place the confusion squarely and uniquely at the feet of Mr Corbin appears to me to give him the kind of excessive powers and importance that brought the party to grief during the Burnham era.
Is leadership all that important in the PNC and should it be concentrated in a single being? Is Mr Corbin dictatorial? If the party is still at the stage that it imposes that kind of behaviour on its leader, then its constitution should be changed. I know, because I receive its press releases, that the PNC has been speaking out on all the issues. I am therefore at a loss to decide what exactly it is that the detractors want. Is it mo’ fire?
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
