Ahead of a crucial vote today, AFC Chairman Khemraj Ramjattan says he has the integrity and experience to lead the party into next year’s election, which he is confident would see the ruling PPP lose its parliamentary majority at the very least.
The AFC’s National Exe-cutive Committee (NEC) will recommend that Ramjattan become its presidential candidate and that party leader Raphael Trotman be its prime ministerial candidate, at its national conference today. Trotman is expected to endorse Ramjattan and vice versa, in keeping with the party’s rotation principle. Any other person who has been properly nominated, would be free to challenge either Ramjattan or Trotman.
So far, only party executive Michael Carrington has signalled his intention to challenge Ramjattan, who the party’s prospective partners for an electoral alliance would be asked to accept. Carrington has criticised the rotation principle as “undemocratic” and charged that the party’s process is geared to prevent a “grassroots” person from being elected the presidential candidate. “It is not undemocratic,” Ramjattan, however, told Stabroek News, adding that if the party fails to live up to its promise of rotation it could be accused of deception. “That could be far more destructive to this party than anything else.”
He emphasised that it did not mean that the process excluded other persons like Carrington from contesting to be the presidential or prime ministerial candidate. “I don’t know what will happen [today], if we’re going to have more people, but we have opened it up for competition,” he said. “It is not automatic and this quarrel with some of us that we’re being undemocratic is rather deceptive.”
Carrington also charged that the Ramjattan’s team had tried “with much vigour” to eliminate him from the race on the ground that he is unqualified, noting that this did not dissuade him from going to the general membership for their approval. Ramjattan, however, denied any association with any “team.”
“I have never been associated with any team that has asked Mr Carrington to decline or to dissuade him from competing against me, at all,” he said.
Ramjattan explained that the party’s rotation principle was devised to accommodate both major ethnicities by promising a switch of the presidential and prime ministerial candidates mid-term. He said it is a mechanism that was attractive to those who wanted to move away from the PPP and the PNCR by addressing the “ethnic security dilemma” and curbing the “maximalist leader” culture. He felt that AFC’s demonstrated commitment to power-sharing internally through the rotation principle could resolve the defects of the society, noting that it has proven a success in Mauri-tius, which has seen development notwithstanding an ethnic divide. “That is why I feel there is strength in the rotation principle for this Alliance For Change and we have to live it through, it is vital, so that people will find the trust in us, so that [they] will not take this to mean a mere tokenism,” he said.
He further noted that unless there is an extremely debilitating organisational structure, democracy would allow the best people to rise to the top of any political movement. At the same time, he said, it is important for the AFC to set itself apart by addressing the ethnic security dilemma, since voting patterns indicate that despite years of wrongdoing both the PPP and the PNCR continue to attract votes from the Indian-Guyanese and African-Guyanese blocs, respectively. “[The rotation principle] is but a deep, profound method of confronting the ethnic security dilemma that we have; far superior, at least in my view, than whatever methodologies you might have,” he said.
Ramjattan, a former MP for the PPP, said he believed that his integrity and experience would be his strengths if he is chosen as the candidate. He noted that even prior to his expulsion from the PPP he has always sought integrity from other members and himself. He noted that even while within the ranks of the PPP, as both MP and a member of its Central Committee, he had always questioned and voiced concern about wrongdoings, dating back to the time of late former Presidents Cheddi Jagan and Janet Jagan. “[I] condemned the corruption that I saw burgeoning in the PPP whilst a member of it and publicly made statements about those things,” he said, adding that he has continued to do so within the ranks of the AFC.
In addition to his political experience, he also drew attention to his legal and parliamentary experience—including holding offices in the Bar Association as well as serving as a member on a number of parliamentary committees—as well as his tenure in various community organisations. According to him, his involvement would show his constant presence in the decision-making forums, where he has sought to argue for what is “good, right and just.”
However, Ramjattan admitted that he believed a major challenge to him as a candidate would be overcoming scepticism from those persons who still associate him with the PPP. “Generally, when politicians come out of a party, they have to do some extra work to prove themselves,” he noted. “Though I think I have done that over the years, I rather still think that will be a challenge, because of the political divide that we have—which is largely based on the racial divide—expects that a leader should come out of one of the two parties, the PPP and the PNCR, and endorsed by them. So it is always going to be a challenge to that extent, being endorsed by a third party.”
He said in African-Guyanese communities, he is often asked why he should be trusted, forcing him to detail his history within the PPP. “It is overcoming that which is the stereotypical characterisation of a politician in Guyana,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ramjattan said he believed that in a “three-horse race” with the ruling PPP and the main opposition PNCR, the AFC could win the election. He contended that the perception that the party cannot win emanates from a “sceptical community,” which believes that the dominance of either the PPP or the PNCR must persist. “We feel that there have been massive changes, especially within that younger grouping that has come of age since 1992,” he said. “People knowing what the PNC was, people now seeing what the PPP is, makes for massive changes, in my perception of the political landscape, that there will be massive changes, huge changes,” he added.
He said he believed that there was a probability of massive “swings” in voting next year, noting the PPP’s poor record in government. He argued that a three-way race coupled with the likelihood of voter abstinence, the elections could be decided with 25% of the vote. He added that while there is tremendous scepticism that the party would not match its performance at the last election, its goal is either to win or at least curb the PPP’s parliamentary majority.
Ramjattan, however, maintained that the AFC would never secure an election victory with an association with the PNCR, saying that it would discourage those disenchanted PPP supporters searching for an alternative. “When we started this movement too, we did it with the purpose of having what is called a long journey to travel, because you have to change, literally, a political culture, you have to change, largely, a voting pattern that is ethnic in orientation,” he said.
