Dear Editor
Today, the Working People’s Alliance will mark the 40th anniversary since its leader Walter Rodney was killed. A Commission of Inquiry (COI) found that he was murdered at the hands of the PNC and its agents. I was the WPA’s Counsel along with Moses Bhagwan (in absentia) and took my instructions from Tacuma Ogunseye, Jocelyn Dow, Dr. David Hinds, Desmond Trotman, Eusi Kwayana and to a lesser extent Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine. Despite the passage of more than thirty years, the evidence provided to me was no less compelling or riveting. In his evidence, Ogunseye told the COI that Mr. Burnham was prepared not to lose power at all costs, and that he was “prepared to do anything to maintain that power”. As the French would say, “plus ca change……”
There were stories of photographs of these persons and their cars featuring in a PNC issued Recognition Handbook; of Roopnaraine and Nigel Westmaas having to seek shelter from Burnham’s goons in the cane fields of West Demerara; of Burnham mockingly promising to send Rodney to the Olympics for outrunning those same goons; of Burnham’s wicked plot to recruit Gregory Smith to kill Rodney and then sending Smith by GDF plane to French Guiana; of the opportunistic issue of passports by the Immigration Department; of the attempted public murder of leading member Dr. Josh Ramsammy in which a top PNC strongman still with us was named by the WPA; and of the killings by Burnham’s police of leading WPA members including Ohene Koama and Edward Dublin. Incidentally I borrow the term “goon” from the WPA’s official publication Dayclean.
But the WPA was not cowed and the courage of Andaiye, Bonita Bone, Dow, Karen De Souza, Hinds, Ogunseye and Roopnaraine and hundreds of unsung heroes, employed and unemployed, academics and labourers, men and women, young and old, all risking their lives for democracy, for Rodney, for each other and for Guyana will long be remembered. When Burnham thought he had covered all the tracks it was a simple woman – Pamela Beharry – who exposed the plot. It was as Dickens would say, the best of times and the worst of times.
I played a minor role in the WPA from 1986 to 2016 but was invited to meetings of the Executive of the Party. For several elections I was associated with fundraising for the WPA and for the 2015 elections specifically, Maurice Odle and I were responsible for fund raising while Kidackie Amsterdam and I were responsible for upgrading the WPA’s facilities in Queenstown and the preparation and distribution of the Party’s paper Dayclean. Both from my knowledge and observation, the WPA has departed from the high standards with which it has always been associated – a party of high principles.
Having played a major role in the weakening and the eventual downfall of the Burnham dictatorship, the WPA has spent the last five years practising some of the very evils for which so many of its rank and file valiantly fought the dictatorship. Unfortunately, no sooner was it given executive power than it willingly accepted the direction that it should use its ministry (Education) and Department (SOCU) to find jobs for its supporters as the AFC was doing at Public Infrastructure and Information. In exchanging its principles for power, it willingly accepted disrespect and indignities from Granger who refused to practise power sharing in his Coalition, leaving the likes of David Hinds and Clive Thomas to fret continually. Despite Roopnaraine’s contribution of the best speeches in the 2015 election campaign, the WPA accepted the rejection of Roopnaraine’s appointment to the Environment Ministry on spurious grounds. I know this because I was a witness to those grumblings.
As time went by, the WPA became tolerant of corruption, incompetence and wastage on a scale unprecedented in Guyana. It witnessed the rapid decline of GuySuCo caused partly by the Granger Administration’s failure to follow the recommendations of a Commission of Inquiry of which Clive Thomas was a co-Chair and author of a major section of the report. It remained silent. Egregiously, the “Doctor” party appeared incapable of calculating the majority of 65 – all because of its embrace of jobs and perks.
I must say this: I have not heard of any accusations of financial improprieties being levelled against the party members in Government. On the other hand, none including Clive Thomas and Rupert Roopnaraine, both famous for their intellectual prowess, has stood out for competence or outstanding performance. Dr. Maurice Odle as Chairman of NICIL is another long-standing member and he will find it difficult to escape responsibility for the many failures of NICIL which bears a large share of the blame for GuySuCo’s near demise.
The women of the WPA were always a formidable set of individuals including Andaiye, Bonita, Vanda and Danuta Radzik and Karen De Souza and individually and collectively made a tremendous contribution to the Party. It might be an overstatement to say they were a balancing influence in the WPA but it does appear that their departure many years ago weakened the Party. This was exacerbated by the departure from Guyana of a whole coterie of the Party’s leadership including Kwayana, Moses Bhagwan, Rohit Kanhai and Nigel Westmaas. I recall driving up to Buxton to pick up Kwayana the morning he left Guyana and of his dissatisfaction with Ogunseye’s role in relation to the violence which had erupted on the lower East Coast.
A movement that was once famous for its values and Rodneyite principles is now deeply involved in the attempt to rig the 2020 elections. It has been silent on the attempt by the Region 4 Returning Officer to rig the elections in favour of the APNU of which the WPA was at one time the second largest party. Judging by their public roles, the leading active members of the Party are Desmond Trotman, Tacuma Ogunseye and David Hinds. The first holds the PNC line in GECOM, Ogunseye remains committed to the romantic notion of a liberation struggle and Hinds’ dismissal of elections moves him sharply away from the WPA’s embrace of multicultural relationships and free and fair elections and closer to the promotion of an increasingly strident brand of African rights.
Hinds as a political commentator and agitator can benefit from his other role – that of an academic. He should do some additional reading on democracy and elections and I strongly recommend to him Staffan Lindberg’s book “Democracy and Elections in Africa”, a passage of which was cited in a recent Malawi elections petition case. This is what Lindberg said:
“While there are many views on what democracy is – or ought to be – a common denominator among modern democracies is elections … But elections are also and more importantly an institutionalized attempt to actualize (sic) the essence of democracy: rule of the people by the people. Every modern definition of representative democracy includes participatory and contested elections perceived as the legitimate procedure for the translation of the rule by the people into workable executive and legislative power…”.
The WPA in the pre-democracy era propounded and embraced as a foundational principle People’s Power which must surely recognise the will of the people expressed in their vote. Hinds wants to reject that vote – to destroy the ballot boxes. He wants power sharing but refused to engage me on a Globespan programme on his definition of power sharing. Hinds who is seen as a leading WPA spokesperson must recognise that Rodney’s party’s power sharing call arose in a pre-democracy era. The WPA subsequently supported inclusionary democracy in Articles 13 and 149 C of the Constitution. What WPA’s spokespersons, including Hinds, are now advocating is the abandonment of these Articles so that their party can stay in power – by any means necessary, to use Ogunseye’s words – as Burnham did from 1968 to 1985.
And just as an afterthought, this power sharing call by Hinds and his colleagues only arose because the vote count showed his Coalition as losing the elections as confirmed by the recount. There are some truths which the WPA seems to want to avoid. That is not what Rodney stood for and was killed for. The WPA should let him rest in peace. I fail to see how they can now celebrate him.
Yours faithfully,
Christopher Ram
