GUYANA’S ‘ONE-LOVE’ OPPOSITION POLITICS IN TROUBLE AHEAD OF COMING 2015 POLL… -the political tango of APNU and AFC
Analysis by Rickey Singh
PARTY politics can be filled with surprises, some quite amusing and distressing. And Guyana’s minority Opposition Alliance for Change (AFC) seems anxious to demonstrate its leadership capacity to deliver a surprising quota of such surprises ahead of a snap general election by mid-2015, if not earlier. But where, within CARICOM, other than Guyana, would a nine-year-old party like the AFC, whose leadership comprises largely of defectors from the country’s two historic electoral thoroughbreds—People’s Progressive
Mr. Khemraj Ramjattan, AFC Leader
Party (PPP) and People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR)-and with seven seats in the 65-member parliament secured at the November 2011-want to lead a coalition of combined Opposition parties at the coming snap general election in 2015? Well, that was the expressed ambition of the AFC’s current leader, Khemraj Ramjattan, lawyer and ex-PPP parliamentarian, who made the surprising announcement of his ambition last weekend, when addressing his party’s biennial convention in Georgetown. For starters, Ramjattan, whose penchant for Opposition politics via press releases against PPP administrations since 1992 is well known-had led the AFC into a post-2011 election parliamentary coalition arrangement with the PNCR-dominated APNU (A Partnership for National Unity). The small, minority Working People’s Alliance (WPA) is also part of APNU.
Fundamental problem A fundamental problem is that Ramjattan did not bother to even engage in prior consultation with APNU at leadership, or any level, about his ambition for the AFC to LEAD a united coalition front against the incumbent PPP at the coming snap general election. On the basis of the November 2011 national poll, the PPP had secured 32 of the 65 seats to the 33 votes for the PNCR-dominated opposition coalition of parties under the umbrella of APNU. The PPP had earlier secured the post of Executive President. It was against the background of a litany of misuse of their combined one-seat majority in parliament, and including recurring injudicious budget cuts of capital and recurrent expenditures that finally resulted in President Donald Ramotar’s decision to prorogue Parliament in the face of a pending no-confidence motion against the Government. Further surprises included Ramjattan’s decision to have fellow PPP parliamentary defector, Moses Nagamootoo, to be the AFC’s presidential candidate at the 2015 general election with the party’s chairman, Nigel Hughes, as his prime ministerial running mate, while he (Ramjattan) strategises to lead from behind!
Not so fast Not so fast, according to a quick response from APNU’s General Secretary, Joseph Harmon. He made clear in media reports that there has been NO prior consultation on the issue of the AFC “leading” a pre-election coalition. Indeed, such a development, it seems, has never been on the agenda of any meetings/discussions involving the APNU and AFC. Given traditional mixing of race and ideology in Guyana’s electioneering politics-similarities also reflected in Trinidad and Tobago’s party politics—the basis for the AFC’s ambitious “leadership” quest of a combined opposition coalition election battle against the PPP is the assumption of the latter’s capacity to appeal more successfully to the Indo-Guyanese voters than APNU. This process of reasoning may have had some validity for the 2011 general election when the AFC increased its parliamentary representation by two from that of 2006. But by combining votes in parliament they managed to secure a single-seat majority against the PPP in parliament which, nevertheless, managed to steer itself through some stormy sessions and benefited from the constitutional powers of an Executive President. That political scenario is quite a contrast to the minority AFC being given—as it seeks-the leadership role in an APNU-dominated alliance for the coming 2015 snap general election. Currently, APNU under the chairmanship of the PNC’s leader, David Granger-an ex-Brigadier of the Guyana Defence Force appears to be in no mood for such an accommodation with the AFC.
*(Rickey Singh is a noted Caribbean journalist based in Barbados)
http://guyanachronicle.com/guy...ngo-of-apnu-and-afc/