Dear Editor,
Well I’ll be jiggered! Mr Hamilton Green has done it again. This time he wants “to see if he can help build a better Guyana.” And as if this is not cynical enough he wants to “lift the tone of society,” and “to see good governance take place in an environment of peace and stability.”
To make this happen, Mr Green nonchalantly proclaims that all those affected by corruption and bad governance and who are desirous of getting involved must be prepared to deal with the government in a way that would make them understand that this is “serious business.” Atta Boy Hammie!
The only problem with what Mr Green wants to do is that the PPP/C government is already doing exactly what Greene claims he wants to do. Nowadays good governance is everybody’s business, including that of the PPP/C and the current administration. We never saw governing as jokie business; for us it is serious business.
So where does this place Mr Green? In the midst of the obstructionists and the ‘green-eyed’ opponents to the progressive developments taking place all around the country. What Mr Green and other critics of the government and the ruling PPP/C seem to forget is that the PPP was in opposition, or as some would say, in the political wilderness for 28 years. We suffered a lot but we also learnt a lot, and we gained immense political experience while in the opposition trenches. We observed the PNC from those very trenches and the way they rode roughshod over the Guyanese people, taking away many of their rights. We know what it means to be in opposition and we know what it is to be in government. What we stood for then is what we stand for now.
It is of interest to note that the PNC is now in opposition for the longest period in its political history. At the same time, the PPP is currently serving in government for the longest period since its establishment in 1950. And from all indications it looks as if it will be this way for some time, unless a political tsunami occurs to upset this equilibrium. The PNC is now learning what it means to be a modern opposition party, and it is doing so at a heavy political price.
The first down payment was made by Hoyte after he lost miserably to Janet Jagan in the 1997 elections. And Corbin made three additional down payments before the 2006 elections, before the 15th Congress of the PNC and the most recent 16th Biennial Congress. That party is now reeling from the wounds inflicted upon it as a result of internal turbulence.
The PNC will never be the same again and Hammie will not make it better. The Pyrrhic victory scored by Corbin at the recent Congress is a reflection of the old PNC doctrine of destroying in order to build. So when Mr Green tells us that he wants to see “if he can help build a better Guyana,” he obviously meant with the PPP in opposition and the PNC in government. No one will take Mr Green seriously. After all, the PNC which is in his DNA and which governed Guyana for almost three decades, did have the opportunity to build a better Guyana. But what happened? Why didn’t the better Guyana emerge? Mr Green must tell us. And the old hackneyed argument that the PPP prevented that from happening just won’t suffice.
Incidentally, along came Mr Lincoln Lewis and in his usual reckless and cavalier style proclaimed that “Guyanese must seriously ask the question how much better off are we as a people [since the PPP/C took office].” The comparative analysis is of no interest to Mr Lewis. He obviously was not asking whether Guyanese were better off since Independence or during the 1964 to 1992 period. His obvious interest is from 1992 to 2009.
Any reasonable person would agree that as a nation we are better off since Independence. The country has certainly not degenerated into a Somalia, Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, thanks to the maturity of the Guyanese people and their total rejection of the kind of politics advocated by Mr Lewis and Mr Green alike. People want to move on with their lives; they know that neither Hamilton Green’s ambition nor Lewis’s antics will help them do so. All these two men’s posturings will do is bring the people more stress, and in these days the less stress the better.
Yours faithfully,
Clement J. Rohee
Member of the Central and Executive
Committee PPP