Whoever believes that there is an easy route out of Guyana’s political dilemma is probably labouring under a misapprehension. The foundations which underpin our political edifices have not been recast in over 50 years, and attempts to remodel the superstructure, therefore, have proved a great deal less than transforming in their effects. If anything has demonstrated that in recent times, it is the story of the AFC. Yesterday, they held their National Executive Conference, although, at the time of writing, the outcome of voting for the senior positions in the party was not known.
That notwithstanding, there are various conclusions which can be made about the state of the AFC at this point, in comparison with when they came to office as part of a coalition with APNU in 2015. Going into alliance with a much larger political entity which commands the majority of the votes is always hazardous, as the Liberal Democrats of the UK found out to their cost when they joined the Conservatives in government in 2010. In the election which took place five years later, British voters punished the party for not distinguishing itself from its senior governmental partner, and for not withdrawing its support for some Tory austerity measures. As it is, it has now been blessed with a deus ex machina in the form of Brexit, and has been rescued from the backwater of British politics by its unequivocal stand in the European elections against leaving the EU.
However, there is no agent of a similar kind on the horizon to rescue the AFC. The party’s equivalent of the Lib Dems’ austerity failings is the inadequacy of its response with regard to the sugar industry, whereby great hardship was caused to entire communities as a consequence of the government’s crude approach and lack of imagination. Discounting the defection of the AFC parliamentarian Charrandass Persaud in the no-confidence vote last December, the party raised no objections to how the sugar predicament was being addressed. The especial irony of this, of course, is simply that Minister of Agriculture Noel Holder is an AFC appointee, not a member of APNU, and it is he who must ultimately take responsibility for how the estates were closed down.
What does the party say now to those Indian voters who gave it experimental support in 2015 on account of their disaffection with the PPP/C in government? Commentators must wonder whether the leaders of the AFC have really registered the disaster that the last local government poll represented for them, more especially considering that they were not in harness with APNU on that occasion. If it was indeed intended as a test of the political waters, they should now have their answer.
But the AFC’s challenges go well beyond the sugar industry. The party had its origins in the first instance in two men, one of whom broke away from the PNC and the other from the PPP. It attracted people who were tired of the stranglehold the two warhorse parties had on the electorate and by extension, the political system, and it offered the promise of a new kind of politics – of honesty, transparency, the rule of law and freedom from the ethnic basis of political decision-making. It sought a multi-racial constituency, and it seems to have had some success in that regard, more especially as it probably attracted an urban middle-class vote. In the 2011 general election, it was surprisingly successful.
When the AFC became part of the coalition government in 2015, the joint manifesto reflected many of its concerns, including the need for constitutional reform to help change the nature of politics in this country. Four years on, we are still waiting for any movement on that front, while any hope that the electorate might have had that government would have exhibited a meritocratic character has been disappointed. Apart from the fact that there are too many ministers, perhaps because President David Granger had so many coalition elements to satisfy, there is the problem that quite a few of them could not be singled out either for their competence or their sense of propriety. Of course, since the AFC has only a minority of ministers, it would perhaps claim that this was outside its jurisdiction to control. The problem is that in a coalition, the AFC will be perceived as taking joint responsibility for government failings as long as it does not express itself determinedly opposed on a given issue.
As far as is known, while it has engaged APNU on matters which might have bearing on the Cummingsburg Accord that underlies the alliance, there is no general principle on which it has strongly confronted its partner as it relates to transparency, corruption or the rule-of-law. And the party should make no mistake, the electorate sees this government as no more incorruptible than its predecessor, and is aware that even some senior AFC officials have failed to meet standards of good governance and integrity. Voters are also conscious of the fact that despite the party’s modest numbers in Parliament, it has always had the potential to hold APNU to account in a situation where the coalition had an overall majority of only one. It would seem that in the end, however, the lure of power won out over the imperative of principle.
That was evident at a very early stage after the coalition government came into office, when, after the passage of a few months, it voted in favour of large salary increases for ministers and parliamentarians. This was despite the fact that commitments of substantial pay rises had been made to the public servants before the election, undertakings which were not fulfilled to the degree that had been promised. The AFC members no less than the APNU ones were seen as having sought office for self-interested reasons, not to help improve the lives of citizens, and, as such, were dismissed as being no different from other politicians.
But leaving aside its record as part of a coalition, the AFC has to justify itself to the public on its own account. From reports, it appeared that there are rifts within the party consequent on rivalry over who should be the party’s prime ministerial candidate in the next government. This argument, it might be noted, comes in a context where no one knows whether APNU will go into the election in alliance with the AFC, or even if it does, whether the post of prime minister will be allocated to the latter party.
Certainly, as we reported the week before last, there were strange manoeuvrings at the Guyana Chronicle pertaining to the reinstatement by Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo of senior AFC official Mr Sherod Duncan as General Manager, after he had been dismissed following the findings of an audit. Apart from the fact that it did nothing to enhance the party’s reputation where probity is concerned, it also opened Mr Nagamootoo to questions in the context of the contention over the prime ministerial post. That aside, the Prime Minister has in any case been operating at the state newspaper more in the tradition of the old PPP member (and minister) he once was, than in the liberal tradition which the AFC ostensibly espouses.
And if that were not bad enough, in our Friday edition we reported that AFC Executive Member Imran Khan had alleged that both he and his wife had been threatened by a “thug” associated with a senior party official. He also claimed in several posts on Facebook that his wife’s name had allegedly been removed from the party’s delegates’ list on Nomination Day, and he had threatened to seek a court injunction to halt the National Executive Conference if the matter were not resolved.
He went on to expand on his statements, making one small segment of the AFC, at least, sound more like the associates of a criminal gang, than members of a political party. “Dangerously, criminals and misfits are infiltrating the AFC with a view to changing its character and direction, and the party must take decisive and condign action to weed them out with haste,” Stabroek News quoted him as saying. Certainly, if there is any degree of truth in all this, the AFC has arrived at a very dark place indeed, and is negating all the liberal tenets which it claims to hold dear and which were in the beginning its raison d’être. In other words, if this is how even a limited segment of the party operates, it would spell the extinction of the whole. With allegations of criminality of this order, how can the public have any confidence in the AFC? At the very minimum, all the endless talk about democracy becomes meaningless when it cannot even conduct a rule-governed democratic debate within its own ranks.
