Dear Editor,
I wish to bring to the attention of APNU+AFC members and supporters an important political point made by Mr Bharrat Jagdeo in his opening address to the PPP/C Congress at Cotton Field Secondary School on the Essequibo Coast. A report which appeared in Kaieteur News on Sunday, December 18, credited the Opposition Leader as saying to the Congress when the PPP/C wins the 2020 general and regional elections they are planning to be in power for 25 years.
The political importance of this statement is not about whether the PPP/C can win the next election – I believe this is wishful thing on the part of Jagdeo ‒ it is located in the expressed intention of the PPP/C to rule the country for the next 25 years post the 2020 elections. Mr Jagdeo has, in very clear language, made known his and his party’s intentions for the future of Guyana. To my mind this would be the worst thing to happen to Guyana, particularly when the 23 years of the PPP/C’s rule – 1992 to 2015 – is taken into consideration. It cannot be denied that Mr Jagdeo is a politician who not only understands the importance of power being located in the hands of an inflexible person and party, but, more importantly, he has demonstrated that he has the ability to use power. Consider what this means when we examine fully, the clear unadulterated message, which he directed to his party members and supporters in his presentation at the just concluded Congress. It is this: when we in the PPP/C get back into the power stream we will do whatever is necessary to ensure that we hold onto it for at least twenty-five years.
The difference between the political mentality displayed by the opposition party and its leadership as it relates to power and that of many APNU+AFC members and supporters is very clear. On the one hand we see the PPP/C demonstrating that by the time of the 2020 general and regional elections power will be theirs once again. On the other hand we see some APNU members and supporters seemingly buying into the propaganda of Jagdeo, the PPP/C and other detractors of the government who feel emboldened to claim that the present coalition is a one-term government. This says a lot about our constituents’ political culture and political gullibility. In trying to understand this negative response of our supporters, it is obvious that we have short memories and that there are cultural influences and conditioning at work. Our people at all levels, leaders and masses, seem not predisposed to understand power, or, how to use it in the way the PPP/C leadership and supporters are culturally equipped to do.
Instead of thinking how to consolidate the political gains we made in 2015 after being shut out for 23 years with all of the known hardships, too many of us are engaged in promoting the self-destructive opposition propaganda of a one-term government for APNU+AFC. Mr Jagdeo‘s declaration should serve as a wake-up call to all our supporters and the country at large. To all those members and supporters who have latched on to the propaganda that the APNU+AFC coalition is a one-term government, I say to them to think of the wrongdoing committed by the PPP/C in the twenty-three years of their stewardship of the country, including the criminalization of the state, and the corruption and theft of state resources, and if after having done so they continue to see the missteps which have occurred under the incumbent government as a basis for political change in 2020, then as a people we are self-destructive.
In closing, I want to say that the PPP/C was never a party with a democratic political culture. It has always had a culture and an ideology of absolute power and absolute domination. We experienced their style of governance for 23 years and its consequential destruction of the country. My call is therefore directed to all those who suffered. Wake up sleeping people! End this nonsense of a one-term government.
Yours faithfully,
Tacuma Ogunseye
