Dear Editor,
A letter on, among other things the PNC rigging (SN April 27), signed by Prime Minister Sam Hinds, was published by your newspaper on the same day as one written by myself on the same subject. Mr Hinds was forthright with his truths and placed before us for consideration a PPP/Civic narrative with its forceful truths in the mix of distortions, omissions and falsities it also contained. But the facile dismissal of power sharing suggests that the PM should request the old PPP files from the days when it entered talks to this end, and see how they planned to solve some of the problems he evokes. From the wilderness, the idea of co-habitation with the enemy did not appear insurmountable.
We note also in his letter, that the simpering righteousness, with its outlandish genuflections to a sanctified Dr. Jagan and its self-serving rejection of the concept of shared governance, only operated to turn up the lights on his government’s own hypocrisies and its dishonesty about the atrocities dripping from its hands. He speaks for an outfit known to have been happy, if not anxious, to share the space with the PNC without making demands for confessions about fixed elections, in the seventies and eighties.
This flexibility of principle and confusion of analysis needs to be accounted for by Mr. Hinds, from whom we expect to hear more concerning his history of our politics.
He speaks for an outfit that was, in its time, against PR and against the Burnham constitution, against this or that… An outfit that has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that it has no permanent “againsts”, only permanent political interests.
The objective always being to get power, and so the insistence on free and fair elections proceeded from no principle higher than that of collective self-promotion.
This much is by now clear to all. At this stage of our political evolution, let us deal with truth, stark and unadulterated.
Now that Mr. Hinds has, as his citizenship entitles him to do, pointed to the beam in the PNC’s eye, a similar sense of civic responsibility will surely urge him to come clean about the logs in his government’s own. Let us hear from him about the Roger Khan incident, the corruption and graft, the nepotism that goes beyond relatives and extends to political friends and business interests.
As ordinary Guyanese requesting clarity from the PNC, we must, in all justice demand the same of the sitting government. As a political personality who has summoned the moral force to impose upon the PNC the need for explanations, he should apply the same ethics to the group to which he proudly belongs. It is about justice, and the rights of the administered to demand an account of those who administer them, not scoring political points. Ours, today, is a government arising from a party that historically has no real use for “free and fair elections.” As its list of friends in communist dictatorships made clear. Its sole interest is in profiting by the numerical superiority of its supporters. Let Mr Hinds lead by example. Let him break voice anew about his party’s sins. Some are quite understandable. Some of the inefficiencies are quite comprehensible. Inevitable in any government. The political culture of criticising others while hiding one’s own faults needs to be cast aside. The slogan of the age should now become “Let it ALL hang out.”
About Tacuma’s mention of the rigging. It is puzzling that Mr. Hinds sees this as some kind of first. Mr Ogunseye as a hero of the WPA would have been part of the group’s open denunciation of the elections of those years. Nothing new in anyone associated with the WPA saying this. If Tacuma was right about that, consider the possibility that, having moved the country out of the PNC morass, some find it their duty to move us to the next step, a political arrangement that is rational in our context.
Mr. Hinds’ statements on power sharing should be seen for what they are, the expediency of a moment when power is unshared, the fear of having the carpet lifted by an incoming partner and the crimes swept under it exposed to light, the reluctance to have the pie further divided…
Today, the PPP enjoys a power as naked as anything the PNC had in its rigging days.
Only, the PNC has moved on to a model of sharing. The PPP is not yet there. Even this is in a way understandable. The PNC made some mistakes in opposition that were bad politics. The two parties by their fallibility seem to suggests that they may best operate side by side in the same government with one restraining the other.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
