Lincoln Lewis, a good friend of mine, never fails to mention to me whenever the liming session turns to the topic of a unity government; that it is something he dreads. After the way the City Council has behaved toward vending on Merriman Mall between Orange Walk and Cummings Street, I have become afraid of unity government too.

There must be an opposition in any country to detect and denounce the creeping intolerance of the State. That there is a creeping dictatorship in the City Council was graphically displayed this week in Georgetown. The AFC and APNU that were so virulent in their denunciation of the PPP dictatorship are silent on the City Council tyranny.

What the City Council has done constitutes a vicious assault on the lives of poor people. The people of this country, with the exception of Mark Benschop, uttered not even a whisper. The AFC-APNU that I campaigned for, its leadership chose not to come to the rescue of the vendors. This puts the WPA in the limelight.
If there is any political organism that you expect to reject the tyrannical mistreatment of the vendors it is the WPA. I have profound respect for David Granger and many in the PNC leadership

.
I respect, and admire deeply, Nigel Hughes and Khemraj Ramjattan, but the PNC and the AFC have their philosophical limitations. It is the WPA of all the political parties in this country that I expected to voice a sympathetic vocabulary for the vendors. The WPA is facing its moment of truth. As a historical party of the left and the custodian of working class biology, it is going to find itself in quick sand as the APNU-AFC regime gets deeper into political trouble.

Take the hypocritical manifestation of the barriers around Parliament. It was the WPA Parliamentarian, Desmond Trotman, who piloted the motion in the House to remove the steel grids that enveloped Parliament Building during the reign of the PPP. When the APNU-AFC came to power and extended the barriers, it was morally incumbent of the WPA to reject the extension. It did not.

You can see trouble brewing inside the WPA; its youth arm has not accepted the rationale behind the huge salary increase for Ministers. I know Christopher Ram is on the WPA executive and I would expect him along with the great stalwarts of the WPA to monitor the democratic lapses that we are seeing. If the WPA is imprisoned by its participation in the government, it runs the huge risk of a slow death.
What the City Council did to those vendors was heartless and sickening. I apologize to each of them for not participating in the picket outside the Office of the President. I didn’t know about it. I will ask Mark Benschop through this particular column to keep me informed of the picket schedule. In an examination of the failure of the GPL, I did indicate that in a forthcoming column I will apply the theory of the over-developed state as founded by the Pakistani political theorist, Hamza Alavi, to explain the failure that is Guyana. The over-developed state inherited from the colonial Leviathan did not cultivate a culture of service.

The state then in Guyana from the united PPP in 1950 to Jagan in 1957 to Burnham in 1964 to Jagan in 1992 to Jagdeo in 1999 to the Coalition in 2015 did not and does not operate with the culture of service. One can argue that the clean-up of Georgetown does not fall within the ambit of state service to the people. Which state institution in Guyana from Independence onwards is imbued with the instinct of service to the population? Every major state institution from the fifties onwards has failed to deliver service to the citizenry. They cannot. The over-developed post-colonial state has produced a psychology that makes serve impossible to achieve.

It was psychologically impossible for the City Council to provide service to the vendors by landscaping the new site then transfer the vendors there. The City Council woke up a morning and simply issued their edict – we are stopping you from selling.And the Coalition Government failed to see the ruthless assault on these poor people. As the picket was going on outside the Office of the President, Carol Sooba and the PPP leadership were laughing all the way to the bank. I was shopping at Bourda Green outside the Bourda Market and many vendors said to me – this is the change you wanted, Freddie.” Honestly, I felt deeply revolted. The March local government election will be fascinating.”