Dear Editor,
The decision of PNC/APNU to meet with the president ahead of the no-confidence vote described in your article, `APNU meets President on Governance,’ brings to the fore my conclusion that all of Guyana’s problems stem from perpetual inside fighting between the PPP/Jagan faction and the PPP/Burnham faction. Threatened today by the potential no-confidence vote against the government, these two groups are circling the wagon to fight off the AFC. I am not distracted by this new composition called APNU.
History tells us that Forbes Burnham joined the PPP, which was established by Dr. Cheddi Jagan. Mr. Burnham was a minister of government in a Jagan administration. Calls for a change in the leadership of the party caused the party to split into two. The two factions still maintained the PPP part of their name for at least two election cycles before the PPP/Burnham faction adopted the name PNC.
For a while, the grievances between the two caused me to think they have drawn apart as separate and distinct bodies. I wrongly believed that the two bodies had different and competitive ideas for the development of Guyana. But the fact that the PPP has never ventured to change the constitution they clamoured against, the inaction of PNC/APNU on the Linden protest, where three were killed, and this present meeting, among many other situations, have taken the blur away from the picture. We cannot forget that the inaction in Linden came after a similar meeting between the two groups. The conclusion can be easily made that Guyana was always ruled by the PPP. The potential no-confidence vote has blindsided these two factions. The impression given is that they feel the governance of Guyana must always remain between the two. Now that the two factions seem threatened by the third force, the two are circling the wagons. When will Guyanese wake up?
Guyana cannot be sustained by this situation. These two factions with their singular ideology have sucked up and stifled all the development energies in the country. They have successfully stripped away the ideology of the UF from our consciousness.
How much different Guyana would have been if some consideration were given to the ideology of the United Force? The strategy today is to kill the potential development ideology of the AFC – the ideology of the party that has embraced the theory of Guyana 21 and more. When will Guyanese stop being Indian for one faction and African for the other against self-interest and begin to think positively about gainfully utilizing the potential of our natural resources?
Yours faithfully,
F. Skinner
