The AFC: Masturbatory fantasies
At the same time, the AFC officially launched its local government election (LGE) campaign at its head office on Railway Road, the first afternoon session of Circo Suarez at D’Urban Park was on its way. Two identical circuses were on display in Georgetown separated by a less than three miles.
Speaker after speaker put some subtle lashes on the PNC indicating that there may be formidable challenges facing unity talks for the 2020 general elections. One speaker told the LGE campaigners that it was the AFC that made the 2015 victory possible. That is indeed so. I don’t think APNU on its own would have achieved a plurality much less a majority. People voted for the symbolic value of the coalition.
What the speaker didn’t go on to say is that after the AFC showed its precious asset to APNU and people of Guyana, it literally threw it away. The best description of how it did that can be found in David Hinds’s critique of the AFC. Hinds said that while in government the AFC purchased all the questionable policies of its majority partner, APNU. My analogy goes like this. You go into a store to buy a used car. One can barely work, one cannot. The one that cannot work costs more than the one that can carry you a few miles. With eyes wide open, you bought the one that cannot drive. You are a fool.
Speaker after speaker denounced the PNC but the AFC’s circus was notable more for what was not said than what was echoed. So what was not said? The Prime Minister did not comment on serious charges by David Hinds and Lincoln Lewis that he, Nagamootoo, could not have tolerated their criticism of the government as columnists in the Chronicle so he ordered their removal.
Khemraj Ramjattan spoke too but did not explain why he advised the president to pick his own GECOM chairman rather than go with the Carter consensus model which though flawed is better than the president’s unilateral appointment.
Ramjattan did not expand on why he wanted to retained in the cybercrime legislation a passage that can easily lead to criminal charges once you criticize the government.
None of the listeners in attendance got up to tell Ramjattan that if the PPP had similar legislation then he, Ramjattan, would have been arrested for all the condemnations he made against the PPP government when he was in opposition. For example, it was Ramjattan that announced that the PPP government was trying to buy three APNU parliamentarians to defeat the no confidence vote in 2014. Under the current Cyber Crime Bill, Ramjattan could have been arrested.
AFC leader, Raphael Trotman, spoke to the gathering too. But he failed to explain why he and AFC ministers, Patterson and Ramjattan, were part of a five-man team overseeing the oil portfolio but were not consulted when the head of the Energy Department was selected. Trotman also didn’t think it was fit and proper to tell his comrades at the rally why an AFC portfolio – oil and gas – was handed over to Joe Harmon’s ministry. David Patterson was all fired up but he too forgot to tell the press who were there that it was APNU that refused the AFC’s request to go into the LGE as a coalition and thus the AFC had no choice. It was both a sad and comical event last Saturday. The AFC was a good thing. The AFC had a good thing going. But it is all gone and it evaporated not because of any hogging of power by APNU. It went because the AFC had no roots in the masses and its small group became obsessed with power. All the AFC speakers were fantasizing last Saturday. In 2016 the AFC was in power and Moses Nagamootoo was the Prime Minister. Yet the AFC didn’t perform in the LGE in 2016. Much to the chagrin of its big brother in the coalition, the AFC failed to dislodge the PPP not even in one of the PPP strongholds either in the NDC sphere or at the level of regional government.
What makes it think it will do better in 2018? It will do far worse. I passed by the campaign and it was over. But this AFC stalwart engaged me in a conversation with two other AFC die-hards, City Councilor Carlyle Goring and Dennis Atwell. She told me she campaigned in all three general elections of the AFC and will in this year’s LGE but despite asking all AFC ministers for a job, she still can’t get one. I was so disgusted with her I promptly drove away.
