The fate of the AFC as a viable political party will be determined in the not-too-distant future. The two extremes of the spectrum of possibilities are that it becomes subsumed under APNU in the same way as the WPA has been, or that it strikes out as an independent entity, unshackling itself from its senior coalition partner. In between these two poles, there may be variations which allow the party to remain in the alliance, but with reduced entitlements in terms of ministerial appointments.
The glue which has held the coalition together up to this point has been the Cummingsburg Accord, which was signed in February 2015, and has a lifespan of between at least three and not more than five years. While there are one or two elements which have not been implemented, in the main, the agreement over how the ministries should be divided and parliamentary seats allocated, for example, has been adhered to. Most important, the provision that the president should derive from APNU (effectively the PNCR) and the prime minister from the AFC has been put into effect.
Faced with another election on the horizon, certainly by next year, the two parties concurred in August that the Accord should be reworked. They announced the optimistic time-frame for the completion of this exercise as being four weeks; however, so far the process has proved considerably more protracted, having lasted more than twice that long. And on Wednesday last week, it stalled completely.
The current sticking point between the two sides is the prime ministerial candidate for the next election. At their national conference in June, the AFC voted for Mr Khemraj Ramjattan to be their nominee for the prime ministership should the coalition be returned to office at the poll. The current incumbent is Mr Moses Nagamootoo. The problem is not only that the PNC is reluctant to accept Mr Ramjattan as their candidate in the role, but they are showing signs they are not interested in having an AFC prime minister at all. We had earlier reported, for example, that it was being suggested that Minister of State Dawn Hastings-Williams was among those being considered.
President David Granger himself could hardly have given the AFC any feeling of reassurance when he said, “This is one of the issues that would have to be discussed … I cannot say now who I’ll be running with.” The main concern, he continued, was that the agreement should “abide by the Constitution of Guyana. That is the principal foundation of any agreement. Nothing in the accord should collide with the Constitution.”
This particular irrelevancy was picked up by AFC Executive Dominic Gaskin, whom we quoted as saying that they were not asking “for the Cummingsburg Accord to supersede the Consti-tution … We are saying that the AFC should name the … candidate. After the elections, the President appoints the Prime Minister as per the Constitution … We did it before [and] there were no complaints.”
More significantly, he also made clear at a press conference that the naming of the presidential and prime ministerial nominees by APNU and the AFC respectively remained a “fundamental and non-negotiable tenet of the coalition.” Furthermore, the party would not consider changing its PM candidate, when it had already made a decision. “We don’t accept that any other entity or other party should tell us or dictate to us who we should have as our prime ministerial candidate,” he said. He went on to tell the media that the AFC had consequently advised APNU that it would not continue further discussions until this matter was resolved.
For its part, APNU resisted suggestions that the talks were stalled. The state newspaper reported APNU Chief Negotiator Volda Lawrence as saying that contrary to reports, the negotiations were continuing. “From the APNU’s standpoint, we don’t see the talks as being stalled at all,” she was quoted as commenting. According to her explanation, in establishing the guiding principles of the negotiation, it had been agreed that if the two parties could not come to consensus on an issue, then the matter would be “parked” and other matters would be addressed. The Chronicle went on to quote her as saying, “If after discussions we still, as a team, on both sides cannot find common ground, then these matters will be [r]eferred to the two leaders.”
In her view, the matter of the prime ministerial nominee had been “parked,” although there was an implication that even she recognised some kind of an impasse had been created in so far as she was reported as saying that as soon as the AFC’s Chief Negotiator David Patterson returned to Guyana, there would be a meeting to discuss the way forward.
“We see ourselves in a partnership; we want to ensure that partnership continues. We believe that we still have that opportunity,” Lawrence said.
It seems likely that APNU would prefer the AFC to remain in alliance with it, if only for the sake of creating the image that it seeks to embrace all sectors of the society. That said, however, at this stage, it wants it on its own terms. There had always been unyielding segments in the PNCR which had felt that too much had been surrendered to the AFC in the Cummingsburg Accord, and that that should be rectified now. In 2015, the AFC brought in the votes which gave the coalition its majority; a small one, but a majority nonetheless. But times have changed, and the general perception in the larger party is that the smaller one has little to contribute now, and so the PNCR can dictate the terms on which the coalition will persist.
As a demonstration, the larger partner cast the smaller one adrift to campaign on its own account in the local government elections, where it performed very poorly. AFC Vice Chairman Cathy Hughes explained away this apparent shortcoming by telling the media that, “The Alliance for Change is a party of principle committed to the fundamental transformation of Guyanese society which includes healing and reconciliation, an end to racial voting, winner takes all politics and constitutional reform which we have preached since 2006.” None of these issues, she went on, were the subjects of the local government elections, which suffered from low voter turnout. “In the absence of a discussion on these major issues, the AFC does not take the results of local government elections as indicative of where the party stands or its standing on major issues of national development.”
Even if one accepts that the local government elections are not a good indicator of party support in the case of the AFC, it has to be recognised that the “fundamental transformation of Guyanese society” and the other things to which Ms Hughes referred, have not been much in evidence in the four and a half years since her party shared office with APNU. As a consequence, the public perception appears to be that the AFC cannot be distinguished from APNU and that its electoral lure has become much attenuated.
As mentioned above, Mr Gaskin has taken a strong line on the prime ministerial issue and the choice of Mr Ramjattan as the party’s candidate, and the media was told that the National Executive Committee would decide on November 2, “on its mode of participation in the upcoming General and Regional Elections.” This would seem to imply that the members of the senior hierarchy were prepared to discuss, at least, the possibility of severing the connection with the major coalition partner, and striking out independently as was done in 2011. In a context where alternative small parties are mushrooming, however, there may be some in the Executive who would regard this as a risky move.
We reported Chairman Raphael Trotman, for example, as arguing that the 2018 local government results showed that the population was not content to see the coalition partners “separate and apart.” It was not in the best interest of either partner to be separate, he said; “none who aspire to lead Guyana over the next decade should be gambling with the people’s future. We have to do what is in the national interest. I don’t see a better alternative to the coalition.”
If this is the line the National Executive elects to follow next weekend, then, as suggested above, it can be assumed that a continuation of the present arrangement will be on the PNCR’s terms. As such, the AFC may have to relinquish the prime ministerial position in the new accord, unless there is someone else in their party the President might be more disposed to accommodate than he is Mr Ramjattan. What can be said is that on the basis of his record, compromise is not the President’s strong suit. When the National Executive meets next Saturday, it really will be taking the most important decision pertaining to its future since it went into alliance with APNU.