The PPP’s era of domination is over
I was in the East Bank Demerara village of Providence last Sunday evening. I was invited by the Alliance for Change to speak to the villagers about their disaster from a badly repaired koker at Peter’s Hall that flooded their homes on October 9.
It is a small world indeed. In the crowd was a man who said he met me in Grenada several times in 1983. He recalled that he worked at the same school with my wife. I chatted with him and he told me a story that was sickening. It was clear to him that the PPP had failed Guyana and there was no way he wanted to hear about “Blackman versus Coolie man” so you must vote for your own race.
That is of course the PPP’s mantra. But from all the conversations I have had with the East Indians of Providence, it looks to me that the days of PPP’s assured electoral victories are over.
The gentleman said to me that he went to the National Library to borrow two books on literature by Guyanese authors, written in the seventies, only to be told that there is only one copy each of these two books and given the state that they are in they cannot be borrowed.
He then said to me in the presence of five AFC officials; “Freddie, Anguilla is 35 square miles and its national library has a collection of all the books written on the English-speaking Caribbean.” I responded by informing him that since 1980, there are about 40 academic books written on Guyana by scholars from different parts of the world and that the University of Guyana has less than ten of those texts.
I am not willing to be so generous to the Indian villagers that I engaged with in Providence last Sunday, to say they have become multi-racial in their outlook and that they may vote for the PNC in the next elections. But two motifs stood out in the hours I have been among them.
They will not accept a PPP sermon of vote for the PPP because it is an Indian party. And they don’t think the PPP is any better than the PNC when the latter was in power.
It was clear to me from my groundings that night in Providence that the PPP is in deep trouble with Indian people. Does the PPP know this? Despite their fanatical obsession with themselves with the accompanying belief in PPP invincibility, the PPP leadership knows that the era of PPP’s electoral domination is over.
I got the distinct impression from speaking to those villagers that they do not like the PPP because they think that it is not a caring government. If these villagers can be made to understand that the PPP is far worse than the PNC, and that the PPP is never ever going to bring Guyana into the modern world, then they will vote the PPP out of office.
The thing that struck me is that they know the PPP will be coming to talk to them and they are fully aware that the race card will be played. So they are expecting it and they will reject it. I sense that if other political parties can seriously ground with them, they will listen and accept those other parties.
The PPP, of course, has no room to manoeuvre and no new ideas to help them win back their glory days. How can you go to a village where people lost millions of dollars due to devastating floods from a badly repaired koker and you sing to them a song you sang to their parents and grand-parents many moons ago – the only alternative to us is the “blaakmaan” party that will discriminate against you if they get back into power.
The problem with that mantra is that time has moved on and has wiped out its effectiveness. In the 21st century there are other political parties on the national scene and they are not African organizations. The AFC comes into the picture. The AFC has really damaged the DNA of the PPP. Once there is a vibrant AFC, the “blaakmaan” genie cannot be released from the bottle.
How can the PPP tell Indians that a vote for the AFC is a vote for “blaakmaan” when Moses Nagamootoo holds centre stage? And the last time I checked, Moses Nagamoo was still an East Indian. One can well imagine the turmoil inside the collective head of the PPP as the general election approaches.
The PPP has only one campaign message, one strategy – don’t vote for the “blaakmaan.” That bell is rung out, that song is sung out.
