Hoyte was not interested in a national unity arrangement with the PPP

Dear Editor,

It is a rare privilege not merely to have Rashleigh Jackson take an interest in what I write (‘Compromise is not a four letter word’, SN October 18) but to seek enlightenment on the period between 1989 and 1992, presumably from me. But I am completely baffled.

I sought in my article (The PNC, APNU and National Unity, SN October 13) to encourage Brigadier Granger to rely on the positive developments on the part of the PNC of the 1984 PPP/PNC talks and the 2001 conversion of Desmond Hoyte to shared governance as platforms to promote and build on its national unity credentials rather than on statements by Forbes Burnham which he could not have meant since to maintain Western support he had to keep the PPP out of office.

Both Rashleigh Jackson and Minette Bacchus now demand of me that I should explain what Cheddi Jagan did to promote national unity in and from 1992.

They not only moved the goal post. They uprooted it and ran out of the football field with it.

But to indulge them, the answer is simple. Hoyte was not interested and demonstrated that disinterest from 1985 onwards without respite until his conversion to shared governance in 2001. He passed away shortly after. Jagan died in 1997.

And the WPA declined the offer of the PPP for a governance arrangement.

I hope that Rashleigh has now seen the light if perchance it was hitherto obscured!

Yours faithfully,
Ralph Ramkarran