A lost year

Missed opportunities

We’ve made it to the end of the year. That’s not a feat to be scoffed at considering what this nation had to face from the arrogant overreaching of the opposition. The year had started with so much hope. The people had spoken and given the opposition control of the National Assembly and the PPP, control of the executive.
You’d have thought it was a golden moment to move from the politics of conflict to the politics of dialogue, wouldn’t you??? The president certainly thought so. In a bold and magnanimous move, he declared the formation of a “tripartite talks” mechanism in which the leaders of the three parties in Parliament would sit down together to plan for the national good.
The plan, being formed by consensus, would then be implemented by the executive and scrutinised by the opposition. All as set out in the Constitution. But the opposition had other plans. If the truth be told it must be said that in the beginning, APNU, under David Granger, did take the opening by the president seriously. He used the forum to bargain hard with the president after the announcement that electricity tariffs at Linden would be gradually brought into line with the rest of the country.
To his credit, he forced the raising of the old age pension to Gy$10,000. But the AFC had other plans: all centred on boosting its own electoral performance. They stayed away from the tripartite talks from the beginning. This was the greatest act of betrayal in our modern political history. It surpasses even Burnham’s splitting of the nationalist movement in 1955. At least Burnham could rationalise his perfidy by claiming the British lured him with the warning that British Guiana would never get independence under Dr Jagan.
What was Ramjattan’s excuse for scuttling the PPP-APNU agreement? Nothing but their narrow shallow political opportunism. Stung by their defeat in Linden by APNU, let it not be forgotten that Ramjattan and Nagamootoo sidled into the mining township and cynically manipulated the community’s economic problems.
They bleated that APNU had “betrayed” Lindeners (a charge recently reiterated by AFC’s mouthpieces Rose and Thunderbolt Singh) and the PPP was “racially spiteful”. We all knew the tragedy that unfolded when APNU frantically tried to short-circuit the AFC’s opportunism. This was the act that torpedoed the greatest opportunity presented to our politicians to practice a new political culture.
Ramjattan and the rest of the AFC will go down in history as the political prostitutes they are.

Get Rohee
The other instance of missed opportunities came out of the opposition’s single-minded obsession with running Minister of Home Affairs Rohee out of office. One has to be clear as to why they picked on Rohee. Ever since the betrayal of Burnham in the 1960s to remove the PPP from office, the opposition has recognised the strategic position of the law enforcement agencies.
The latter had earned this importance because of the tactic the opposition had been introduced to by the CIA to topple the government of the day: riots and other violent ‘protests’. The police was the one institution that stood in defence of the Constitution. So as the present opposition embarked from the beginning of the year to topple the government once again – they knew that had to weaken the police’s resolve.
What better way to do this than by personalising their grievances in the person of the minister – who guides policies for the police. If there is confusion at the top, the opposition reason, they would have a clear field to create confusion and mayhem. This must be resisted in the New Year.

The courts
But all is not lost. This year we saw the judiciary rising to its constitutional role to be arbiters of the Constitution. The opposition wankers have not been allowed to get away with all of their overreach.