Asgar Ally, formerly a People’s Progressive Party Minister of Finance who founded his own Guyana Democratic Party; Sheila Holder who was actually representing the Guyana Action Party-Working People’s Alliance in the National Assembly at that time; Khemraj Ramjattan, a former chairman of the Progressive Youth Organisation and executive member of the People’s Progressive Party; Raphael Trotman, a former member of the Central Executive Committee of the People’s National Congress Reform and Anthony Vieira, formerly of the United Force and who would shortly afterwards enter the National Assembly on the People’s National Congress Reform-One Guyana ticket, were all on stage.
Controversy arose from the start. The Alliance seemed to have been the brainchild of three politicians – Sheila Holder, Khemraj Ramjattan and Raphael Trotman. They had all been elected to the National Assembly on the tickets from other parties. They all refused to surrender their seats even after they had severed relations with their parent parties and, evidently, no longer wished to represent the interests of the people who elected them.
The Alliance’s leaders did not appear to have repudiated the ideas and beliefs to which they adhered for years as members of their parent parties. Controversy arose over defining what the Alliance stood for. Could a political party comprising such a motley collection of personalities of diverse political persuasions ever become a coherent organisation for change? What was their motivation for coming together? What were their aspirations for the country, their supporters and their ambitions for themselves?
Despite these anxieties, the Alliance did attract the support largely from some elements of the public who had grown fed up with a two-party political culture. At the time of the Alliance’s birth, the country was reeling from the effects of the most devastating environmental catastrophe – the Great Flood of January 2005 – and the most deadly campaign of criminal violence in its history – the troubles on the East Coast. As a result, even Ramjattan’s and Trotman’s desertion from their respective parties was regarded less as treason rather than as a positive reason for rejecting the two behemoths – the PPP/C and PNCR.
Public enthusiasm over the emergence of new political parties in Guyana, usually, has been ephemeral and has not been converted easily into electoral support at the polls. The Alliance’s challenge has been to persuade the polarised constituents of the two major political parties that it could offer a third way out of the wilderness of criminal violence, ethnic rivalry, environmental disaster and economic stagnation into which the country had wandered.
There was suspicion that the new party had been funded by foreign interest groups almost from the start. The astonishing appointment of the well-known US political pollster Dick Morris in the run-up to the 2006 general elections reinforced those suspicions. Even after the elections, the Alliance’s lavish publication of whole-page advertisements in the Trinidad and Tobago Express newspaper, criticizing the Guyana administration, raised questions about the sources of its financing.
President Bharrat Jagdeo himself remarked, in response to the advertisements, “I have always had this issue, where would the AFC find all of this money…they spent more money than the PNC and the PPP in the last election campaign and they are spending a lot of money. Can you imagine how much it costs for these ads to run in Trinidad and Tobago? Very expensive! So they have a lot of money. I have already asked about the source of that money because they like to accuse other people of having links with drug dealers…but they are yet to speak about the questionable source of their financing,” the President said.
Alliances
A score of micro-parties had sprung up like mushrooms on the political landscape over the last two decades, only to perish after a few months. One dozen parties contested the December 1997 elections, for example. Most had limited public appeal and meagre resources and sought hastily to forge alliances. Their intentions were that their combined electoral votes would win a seat or two in the Assembly. This, they hoped, would enable them to hold the balance in the event that either of the two larger parties – PPP/C or PNCR – failed to win an overall majority in Guyana’s peculiar proportional representation system.
As the campaign for the 2006 general elections got underway, attempts to forge the Guyana Third Force coalition began. The proposed force was intended to include Paul Hardy of the Guyana Action Party, Rupert Roopnarine of the Working People’s Alliance, Ravindra Dev of the Rise Organise And Rebuild movement and Peter Ramsaroop of Vision Guyana. The Alliance steered clear of the minnows and swam on its own out of the shallows into deep waters.
The gamble paid off. The Alliance on its own was able to capture 28, 366 or 8.34 per cent of the votes – largely at the expense of the PNCR which went into the elections badly weakened by a leadership crisis. It outstripped all of the micro-parties and established itself as the third largest party in the country. But the fragility of its support base was also evident.
In what it described as a bid to “place more power in the hands of the people,” the Alliance announced in January 2010 that it was prepared to enter into strategic civic partnerships to contest the local government elections. Trotman reported that the Alliance would pursue partnerships with civil society groups, leading personalities and other political parties.
Does this mean that the Alliance plans to be part of a centre force in Guyana’s politics? To be effective, a centre force must command sufficient seats in the National Assembly to enable it to influence legislation, particularly the annual budget, decisively. This can occur only when the winning party – either the PNCR or the PPP/C – ends up with a minority of seats. In such a situation, one of the larger parties would be forced to seek make a deal with centre force parties to pass legislation.
The original United Force played a classical centre force role after the December 1964 elections. That party, with 12.4 per cent of the vote and seven seats in the Assembly was able to coalesce with the People’s National Congress with 40.5 per cent and 22 seats – compared to the People’s Progressive Party with 40.5 per cent and 24 seats – to form the administration.
Arithmetic
The Alliance’s 2nd Delegates’ Convention held in July last year under the optimistic theme “From third force to First Choice.” The three leaders – Holder, Ramjattan and Trotman – predictably, in the tradition of local political party leadership, returned the top three to the posts they held from the start.
Trotman went on to claim rather extravagantly that, apart from the urban centres of Georgetown, New Amsterdam, and Linden, delegates and observers to the Convention had come from Aishalton, Orealla, Port Kaituma, Moruca, Kwakwani, New York, Canada and the United Kingdom. He felt that in the few short years of its existence that the Alliance was already “well on its way to achieving greatness.” Greatness, however, is more than a well-attended convention.
The reality down in the constituencies was that the Alliance’s performance in the 2006 general elections – especially in Ramjattan’s home district on the Central Corentyne where the PPP holds sway – was risible. Questioned about what kind of support the Alliance enjoyed, Ramjattan told an audience in Canada with some exaggeration that the base “has been growing all across the country even in Amerindian areas and areas noted as PPP strongholds such Port Mourant, Whim and Tain.” The Alliance recently opened an office at Whim Village but it is left to be seen whether Ramjattan will gain more support there in 2011 than he did in 2006.
Does the Alliance have an ideology? Executive member Gerhard Ramsaroop, in an interview with the Guyana Review in October 2009, explained that, “First and foremost we subscribe to the concept of liberal democracy which is tightly tied to protection of individual rights, rule of law, and limitation of the power of the executive. Secondly we are genuinely multi-ethnic. Thirdly, we are unreservedly pro-private enterprise.”
In the context of present-day politics, there is nothing to distinguish the Alliance from the other parties which claim similar credentials. Whether this declaration of beliefs can convince the majority of the electorate to support it might never be known. But ‘events’ quickly overtake ‘intents.’ In this instance, the Alliance’s performance at the polls, such as it was, could not guarantee the loyalty and solidarity of its fragmentary membership. It was just a matter of time before that ever-present and irrepressible poltergeist of Guyanese politics – the ethnic factor – raised its head. This happened within a week of the elections in September 2006.
The case of Gaumatie Singh, Secretary of the Alliance and a candidate in the elections, symbolized the dangers in a congregation of persons who were united more by their opposition to other parties than anything else. Upset that she was not selected for a seat in the National Assembly, Singh angrily announced her resignation on September 8, taking the trouble to call a press conference to publicise an e-mail exchange between herself and the party’s presidential candidate Raphael Trotman. Singh said that she had been informed by party executives that she was promised a seat once the Alliance had secured more than three seats and was shocked to learn that she had not been nominated.
The lesson of the fallout was to show that the Alliance had ignored the ethnic factor. Singh claimed that persons in the Pomeroon-Supenaam Region had voted for the Alliance only because they thought that she was the person who was going to be selected “to give representation on Indian people’s behalf” in the Assembly. She warned Trotman that he had “made a grave mistake” in selecting someone else and accused him of being “another PNC dictator.” For good measure, she also threatened to destroy the entire party.
Alliance Chairman Khemraj Ramjattan in a report carried in the Indo-Caribbean World on the November 25, 2009 on his visit to Toronto, similarly, told a meeting of the emigrant Guyanese that if there is going to be an AFC government then three cabinet ministerial positions should go to members of the Diaspora.” Could this be the policy of the Alliance?
Ramsaroop in an interview with the Guyana Review in October last year, explained that, “within one year of assuming office, we will have in place, in the police force, officers from the Scotland Yard, Scottish Police Force, or some other credible jurisdiction in key positions in the force. Within that same year, or certainly no later than the end of two years, we will also identify a cadre of officers who will take over from the overseas officers when they leave.”
He added, with a comment that could have been taken from the ROAR playbook, “With respect to having the force ethnically representative, the real issue is that of legitimacy in the eyes of the public at large. From an objective standpoint the force can be absolutely professional, but from a subjective standpoint the citizens may not accept it as legitimate if it is dominated by any one race which would lead to tensions in the society.”
The Alliance has to face several challenges. Its most recent came only a few weeks ago. Since the announcement of the results of the 2006 General and regional Elections on August 31, the Alliance complained that the Guyana Elections Commission had miscalculated the number of votes the party had received in the Upper Demerara-Berbice Region. The Alliance claimed that the Commission ought to have allocated it a sixth seat, which, it argued, was mistakenly awarded to the People’s Progressive Party Civic. GECOM nevertheless arranged to have the flawed figures published in the Official Gazette on the October 19.
Chief Justice Ian Chang on February 16, 2010 dismissed the elections petition filed by the Alliance on the grounds of procedural non-compliance as the AFC had failed to file an affidavit of service immediately after bringing the petition to the court.
Still not quite five years old, the Alliance For Change needs to grow up quickly and learn from the experience of The United Force. That party had the ability to capture over 16 per cent of the popular vote in its heyday and did become a real centre force in the National Assembly. Today it is a zombie.
