“A week is a long time in politics,” British Prime Minister Harold Wilson famously said, and there can be nowhere in the political universe where that remark was more applicable than in Guyana recently. The finale of the PPP Congress
last Sunday inaugurated what was arguably the most eventful week in this country for a long time, a week which ended with the announcement that Sithe Global was pulling out of the Amaila hydro project. But even that dramatic communication was overshadowed by the seismic shift in the political landscape which had occurred a few days earlier, when the AFC committed hara kiri, and its leaders found themselves with no firm ground on which to set down their feet. Whether their individual political careers will survive that act of party self-destruction remains to be seen, although for some of them, at least, the prognostications perhaps might not look so good.
The intimations that the AFC might be deviating from its much publicized position on Amaila came in a strange letter from Mr Moses Nagamootoo, published in this newspaper on July 24. In it, Mr Nagamootoo related how he had been in last minute talks with leading government figures in the Speaker’s Chambers and had offered them the AFC’s support for the Hydro Electric Power (Amendment) Bill in return for compromise on their part, but that they had refused. He wrote: “Give us [AFC] local government reforms and the Public Procurement Commission and the PPP could run with Amaila all the way to the bank!”
The letter went largely unremarked at the time, possibly because people assumed that this did not represent a change of direction for the AFC, so much as a case of Mr Nagamootoo flying his own kite. With the benefit of hindsight, questions can be raised, although if some kind of understanding was indeed come to with the PPP/C subsequently, it did not include the Public Procurement Commission at the Amaila stage of the parliamentary proceedings. Perhaps there was no deal, and the PPP/C decided to agree to the local government bills because there were already public signs the AFC would vote with it on Amaila.
Mr Ramjattan during the life of this Parliament had appeared to show more political acumen than the other party leaders – until this recent extraordinary fiasco, that is. It is a mystery why he cannot see now that there is a fundamental issue of trust involved after he first assured his supporters that the AFC decision on Amaila would await the IDB’s due diligence in October, and then he abandoned that position and executed a complete volte face, leading his party to vote with the government on the bills. He had earlier told the electorate that given the many financial questions surrounding the project the AFC would take the ‘responsible’ approach, informing them that even the IDB could not provide the reassurance that tariffs would be lowered after Amaila came on stream.
Now it so happens that the ‘responsible’ approach was not completely above criticism, as Professor Thomas had pointed out, but it was far from being the worst stance either, and perhaps could have been modified to an even more ‘responsible’ one if necessary. But what does one say of a leader whose only defence for voting with the PPP/C, first to return the Amaila bills to the House for debate and then to pass them (amended in one instance) is: “We felt that if we had not supported the bill, Amaila would have been killed.” Whatever is he talking about?
If there were genuine financial questions before, those still remain, and by its vote the AFC was prepared to effectively give the government a blank cheque in relation to this project without having its key concerns addressed. And if Amaila could not be shown to be viable for Guyana, financially speaking, (which it can’t at the moment) then the responsible thing to do would indeed be to ‘kill’ the project – which is not the same thing as saying that hydropower in Guyana is dead, or that Amaila could not still be put out to tender. Even Mr Ramjattan himself had been at great pains previously to explain that the AFC was not opposed to hydropower per se. With Sithe now pulling out after APNU ‒ and not the AFC ‒ did the responsible thing in terms of the parliamentary vote, the small party is left looking silly, quite apart from being cloaked in the garb of perfidy.
But as the public well knows, this drama involved Mr and Mrs Hughes as well as a one hundred and eighty degree turn on the part of the AFC. Mr Nigel Hughes is the Chairman of the party, and his wife Mrs Cathy Hughes is one of its parliamentarians. A furore erupted when it came to public attention that Mr Hughes is also the Company Secretary for Sithe in Guyana. Mrs Hughes is the PRO for Sithe here, something which has certainly been in the public domain for a considerable time, although nobody bothered about it before it seems, perhaps because until last week the AFC was taking a line in Parliament which was clearly not in Sithe’s interest. Having said that, however, both Mr and Mrs Hughes were in a classic conflict of interest situation.
Mr Hughes has pointed out that he had been the Company Secretary long before he became the Chairman of the AFC, and on acceding to his post in the party had asked to be recused from meetings dealing with Sithe matters. For his part Mr Ramjattan said he knew about Mr Hughes’s connection to Sithe, and the public ‒ which did not know about it prior to this ‒ was given to understand that he had no qualms about it, any more than he had about Mrs Hughes’s connection. It is not that there is any suggestion that Mr and Mrs Hughes were unable to separate their commitments to Sithe from their commitments to the AFC ‒ although that could not always have been easy ‒ or that they attempted to influence AFC decisions on the Amaila project, rather it is that, perception is everything in politics, and in this instance, the perceptions did the party no credit.
After the issue became public, Mr Hughes offered his resignation to the AFC, which mistakenly it did not accept. As it was, therefore, the perception problem did not go away, more particularly when the party went to Parliament last week to vote with the government on Amaila. That aside, no one should have to tell two highly intelligent people, one of whom is a prominent lawyer, no less, what constitutes conflict of interest. What it means is that the AFC, such as it is, is now in no position to lecture the government on the subject of conflict of interest, among several other matters.
Mr Ramjattan and the AFC leadership do not appear to have grasped the enormity of what they have done. The party promoted itself as representing a return to decency, the rule of law, transparency, ethical behaviour in public life, etc. While from bitter experience Guyanese are cautious about their political parties’ avowed principles, nevertheless, the AFC supporters did elevate their party somewhat above the others, in the belief that they stood a little higher on the moral scale, so to speak. That image gave greater force to their criticisms of government’s transgressions, and partly as a consequence, the PPP spent a lot of energy trying to traduce the party’s leadership. But where will they find a place now to stand and criticize any political entity and be taken seriously?
