…of political deceit
…of political deceit
Well! Well! Well! Who says you can’t go back home?? Raphael Trotman, Leader of the AFC, certainly showed Tom Wolff he was wrong when he wrote his famous novel of that name. But then, unlike Wolff and his town folks, Trotman’s been very careful not to throw any brickbats at his old comrades in the PNC, hasn’t he?? And now that he’s offered absolution to the beleaguered Chairman of the PNC, Volda Lawrence, when not a single PNC leader would, he’s ensured he has at least one friend in high places in the once and always paramount party!!
Trotman has always been a very transparent, if odd, egg! A devotee of Burnham and his wily ways, he was brought into the PNC by Desmond Hoyte, who wanted to remake the thug image of the party he inherited. Trotman had impeccable League of Coloured People credentials, and took to politics like duck to (muddy) waters. So he had no compunction to be the one who egged on Hoyte into extremist behaviour after the 2001 defeat with the slogan: “The PPP must be exposed; opposed and deposed”, yet demanded that the PNC “apologise” for its excesses.
When Hoyte unexpectedly passed away in 2002, Trotman demanded he be made “leader or nothing”! Corbin, who’d apprentised at the feet of Burnham himself in the art and practice of “wiliness”, ensured he got “nothing”!! It didn’t take much from one foreign embassy to persuade Trotman (as well as another frustrated, opportunistic, wannabe leader from the PPP – Ramjattan) to launch out on his own.
They say “two man crab cyan live in de same hole” and the relationship between Trotman and Ramjattan was always tenuous at best in the AFC they formed. Poutings, withdrawals and returns became the order of the day with Trotman. But when the PNC under Granger’s leadership chose him as the Speaker of the House over Nagamootoo, your Eyewitness knew (and wrote) that Trotman had knocked on the PNC’s door.
Then the APNU/AFC Coalition won the 2015 election, and Trotman cryptically revealed he’d struck a demarche with Granger at a meeting in Nassau, Bahamas. But from the high of being the blue-eyed boy in charge of oil, which was handed to the coalition on a platter, Trotman was cast into the doghouse after he blew the oil contract negotiations with Exxon.
His outlier backing of Lawrence, therefore, must be seen as part of his frantic efforts to be rehabilitated into the PNC, since he’d long concluded the AFC was “dead meat”, consisting only of the carcasses of Ramjattan and Nagamootoo!
Lawrence, however, should be careful of Trotman’s importuning. Like Brutus, he has that “mean and hungry look”!
…from the Budget
On Monday, the Budget debate began. Your Eyewitness hopes that, unlike him, you’re not one of the countless thousands frustrated by the barricades around Public Buildings! He isn’t sure why they’re worried about the noise from passing cars, since that can’t possibly drown out the cacophony from the duelling MPs inside!!
Be that as it may, this year the PNC’s made it easier for us to evaluate the Budget. And don’t think it was only PNC Volda Lawrence who articulated the thrust of the Government’s spending with her now (in) famous utterance: “The only friends I got is PNC, so the only people I gon give wuk to is PNC; and right now I looking for a doctor who can talk Spanish or Portuguese, and ah want one that is PNC!”
Even before the LGE, Finance Minister Winston Jordan, who crafted the Budget, had apologised to the PNC faithful at Stabroek Market Square, and declared with a wink, “We have not forgotten that it’s you who put us here.”
Let’s now count the ways of remembrance!
…of Green Development
The PNC Government boasts about its Green Strategy Development Programme; yet we’re just informed by PNC Chairman of Region 10, Renis Morian, that President Granger agreed to a refinery at Linden!
Will the smoke be green?