Exercise books, personal bank accounts and votes
I am convinced in my mind at the deepest level that if people like Nigel Hughes, Mark Benschop, Dr. Troy Thomas of Transparency International,
Freddie Kissoon
Christopher Ram, David Hinds and others like them, each form their own political party, each one of their parties will get more votes than the AFC if the AFC contests the upcoming election on its own.
I am convinced in my mind at the deepest level that Donald Trump will lose the next American presidential contest. Trump fascinated the lower classes with his slogan, “drain the swamp.” They voted for him because he was new to politics and didn’t hobnob with the Washington DC political cabals.
Trump will haemorrhage votes from those classes because he made the swamp even thicker. Many of his appointments were billionaires. When the campaign heats up next year, that slogan will be Trump’s nemesis.
You cannot win votes for your re-election if you behave like the previous government you defeated. Voters will say you are no different from the scoundrels we hated and we voted out. That is what happened to the Lib-DEM party when they went into a coalition with the Conservative Party in the UK.
Voters saw the centre of left Lib-Dems as the opposite of the right-wing, Conservative Party. So they punished them at the election. Lib-Dem was almost destroyed.
If any party anywhere the past one hundred years has learnt nothing about electoral politics it is the APNU+AFC entity. This is a regime that is stupendously mindless. All the leaders of the APNU+AFC should be eternally grateful to this newspaper. It exposed daily corruption of the Jagdeo/Ramotar hegemonic state. Those revelations were so incredible that they contributed to the APNU+AFC victory.
All the APNU+AFC leaders knew how self-destructive to the Jagdeo/Ramotar were corruption scandals. Yet after APNU+AFC won power, they have walked into the same swamps. How do these people hope to be re-elected? Unless they think that the entire electorate of Guyana is stupid.
Buying tickets for Buju Banton concerts for poor people will not win you votes. People will take your gifts, lap them up, then laugh at you because they know the gifts were intended to fool them.
The story of the exercise books being printed in Trinidad while local companies were pleading for some contracts is straight out of the songbook of the PPP. We read about these things under Jagdeo and Ramotar and we were disgusted. They are happening under the APNU+AFC.
I was never afraid to telegraph my thoughts and I have lived with the consequences. I am telegraphing one of my thoughts today again. I say again because this particular thought was published many times on this page – the APNU+AFC got my vote in 2015. It will not get it again. I am voting for either the Amerindian Party or the Fed-UP party in Berbice. If the contest comes down to just two contestants – APNU+AFC and the PPP, I will not vote.
There isn’t a person on Planet Earth that could convince me that Minister David Patterson was naïve when he allowed the Chinese Government to reimburse him with a cheque into his personal bank account. He had the experience of what took place during the days and nights of such tales under the PPP.
He had to know, as a practising politician what happened at NCN. The general-manager accepted payments into his personal bank account from advertisers. He was removed. At the time when the scandal broke out at NCN, the reaction country-wide was why not NCN’s account, why his?
I am not making any accusation against Minister Patterson. But his action is bewildering because the personal account thing just jars the nerves. He did not pay for the trip with his own money. A section of his ministry dealing with maritime issues did. So why not forward one the number of the accounts of his ministry to the Chinese embassy?
Under the rule of Jagdeo and Ramotar, not a day went by without some scandal. We are seeing the song play out since 2015. In the midst of the reporting on the exercise book, there comes the bank book thing with Patterson. What will it be tomorrow?
I don’t believe in the history of politics in this country, a political formation has thrown away prodigious goodwill it received from the electoral in so quick a time as the APNU+AFC has done.
We are close to a general election. It would have been a more presentable posture for the four ministers who resigned as dual citizens to sit it out. But the APNU+AFC reacted in identical fashion to the PPP. They brought back the four in different clothes.
