Jun 22, 2016 Source
All of the persons from City Hall administration that went to Mexico are from the era of City Hall politics of the mid-nineties. The Mexico trip is not only a financial scandal, but politically disgraceful. It is naïve to think that the four persons that went to Mexico were not aware of the vexations it would generate among people. They knew there would be fallout, but it is an attitude shaped by the period when they were in control of City Hall and the political culture they were born into.
This paper quotes Mr. Oscar Clarke as saying he will not apologize. It quotes Mr. Clarke as being defiant. None of the four persons that went to Mexico, at the psychological level, believe and accept that they were wrong in the procedures they adopted. The reason being; that is the culture which they were inducted into a long time ago. New eras call for new thinking, but new thinking cannot emerge from persons who are victims of an age long gone.
Contrast the attitude of the Mexico trippers and young Sherod Duncan. Very young in politics, Duncan didn’t understand what was going on. That was not the way he saw bureaucracy, power, and accountability. So he cried wolf. He was confused. How can he be the Deputy Mayor, and he and his elected colleagues did not know that the Mayor, two councilors and the Town Clerk were in Mexico? So he went public with his feelings of frustration.
The Duncan outrage is a vivid manifestation of what lies ahead for Guyana. If this troubled land is going to surmount the social morass that it has lived with for decades, then, transformation will not come from people who are victims of their epochs that were shaped by ancient political culture. The people that went to Mexico were not nurtured in a political culture of accountability and democracy. These are concepts they have not seen in operation throughout their political careers.
It was for this reason that it would have been good for Guyana if dominant parties did not seek to control the City Councils and townships and NDCs during the local government elections. When one speaks of Guyana needing new faces for it to fashion a better country, age is not the factor. New is not the opposite of age. By new is meant people who were not victims of a certain epoch, where a certain type of understanding, narrative, conversation, way of doing things, administrative styles etc., were the prevailing values and are no longer valid thirty years after.
When people say that Guyana needs new faces, they really mean people who were never part of a political culture that was oligarchic and unaccountable. This is where the PPP failed after Mrs. Jagan resigned. Mr. Jagdeo was facilitated by the strong Stalinists in the PPP’s hierarchy. He was their prisoner. Then he became one of them. Jagdeo went wrong because as a new face in the PPP, he was virtually a footnote in the scheme of things. Mrs. Jagan and the Stalinists made him their Pavlovian creature. He accepted that role and became a willing prisoner of the culture of the PPP. As he grew in power, he only understood one thing – PPP’s culture. Jagdeo became what he saw in others in the PPP when he, Jagdeo, was a young member.
That is what the zeitgeist to which you belong does to you. I can rattle off my head, dozens of Guyanese who are over 55 years of age but are new faces that can facilitate the transformational needs of Guyana. The simple fact is that they were never part of an organizational culture that had as its core the unaccountable use of power. If the APNU-AFC Government is going to succeed, it has to nurture minds that are different from the people that went to Mexico. If the PPP has any chance of regaining power, it has to exorcize the ghosts of the past that currently control the PPP.
What are the signs that both the PPP and the Coalition are heading in the direction of transformation? Surely, the PPP has to be discounted. Endowed with a hardline, Stalinist culture, the ghosts of the past do not, and will not, give any recognition to democratic instincts. There is no one in its hierarchy that accepts that the PPP must democratize and accept leadership challenges. To be honest, the APNU-AFC Coalition hierarchy does not embody that kind of Stalinist mind-set, but a transformational vision doesn’t seem to be on the horizon. I hope I am wrong.