Opposition voters would be justified in asking what their party really stands for and whether it is even aware of what country it should be operating in. What does it have to say on the consequences of climate change, for example? Is it campaigning for a study on the likely effects and the best options in response? With the recent flooding the warnings are all around us, and President Ali’s proposal is for a new city on the Highway. What does the opposition think about that? Nobody knows.
And then there is the pandemic. It has made the odd comment, at least one of which emanating from Opposition Leader Joe Harmon was quite irresponsible, but there has been no vaccination campaign among its constituents, a serious dereliction in the case of Region Ten, which has the lowest rate of all the regions in the country. Never mind the pettiness of the PPP/C which refuses to work with APNU+AFC, if it takes itself seriously it should rise above that and do the best for the health of its supporters – and by extension everybody else. But it gives the impression it is not interested in the safety of the public where the virus is concerned.
There are a slew of other things too, some of which it is informed about from its own period in office. There is oil in particular, which it handled badly during its five years, but that is no reason now not to address the matter more professionally; and then there is the gas to shore project for which it had commissioned a feasibility study, but about which it is strangely unforthcoming these days. The government is steaming ahead on the basis of probably flawed assumptions and Messrs Granger, Harmon and their cohorts are not hammering them on the subject at all.
Even on a matter about which as ex-army men the Party and Opposition Leaders would boast some expertise, they have been silent. The new security force under military control has triggered not the slightest response from them even though their AFC colleague Mr Khemraj Ramjattan raised its possible unconstitutionality when it was first announced in Parliament. And then there are all the other things which affect Guyanese life, sometimes on a daily basis in which the opposition appears to have no interest. In short, it has offered no policies and projected no vision.
The PNCR is currently in total disarray with the leadership embroiled in a struggle for its survival, so theoretically it might be thought that under the circumstances it is incapable of applying its mind to substantive policy matters. Still, it might equally be thought that it was at just such a time that it would have made a greater effort to prove its worth by confronting the government on a range of issues. But since it has a poor record on the policy front even when in office, it is more than likely it has not been distracted by leadership conflicts.
The single stratagem it has clung to in the post-election era is to harp on about being cheated during the 2020 election, and to lambast the government about widespread racial discrimination and corruption. It doesn’t seem to matter that no one is paying much attention to the untenable allegation that the PPP/C is illegally in office, or that anyone of any credibility believes it. One suspects that even many of the party’s own constituents don’t take such claims seriously.
What can be said is that not just the current leaders, but also those who aspire to take over from them are united in their insistence that the government came into power through fraud. And since they don’t seem to be getting much traction locally, they have taken their message to the United States. According to reports a series of events were held in New York earlier this week organized by Guyanese Organiza-tions Against Racism (GOAR). One of them involved a march and rally in Brooklyn advertising itself as being ‘anti-PPP racism’. Arranged by members of the diaspora, chief among whom was Mr Rickford Burke, it was not to all appearances associated with the official leadership of APNU, since neither Mr Granger nor Mr Harmon were present. Nevertheless, all the usual shibboleths found expression there.
There were claims that more than 2,000 public servants had been dismissed on the grounds of race, that the PPP/C was stealing taxpayers’ money and that millions allocated in the National Assembly were not making it to the people, while Covid and education grants were not being given to all villages. It was President Ali himself who refuted the statements about the distribution of the grants when speaking on the sidelines of an event at Cove and John. Certainly, Mr Sherod Duncan and Region Six Representative Ms Natasha Singh-Lewis, who were reported as making some of the claims, offered no breakdown of which villages had allegedly been bypassed, or provided a list of those excluded from the Covid payment.
In fact, an absence of evidence was the hallmark of the occasion, as in the case of these 2,000 public servants who purportedly had been dismissed on the grounds of race. Their posts were also not identified, and APNU was not about to enlighten the unduly curious. As for the millions allocated in the National Assembly not making it to the people, as anyone with even a smidgeon of understanding about how the budget works knows, what was presented was a meaningless generalisation.
The most surprising attendee at the rally was Georgetown Mayor Ubraj Narine. Exactly what he was doing there rabbiting on about 2,000 public servants dismissed for racial reasons is a total mystery. Does he believe that Guyana’s capital has been relocated to Brooklyn? There are genuine problems for the city authorities in relation to the central government, but these are apart from the PNCR’s inexplicit claims. How can he possibly be expected to retain any credibility as the chief citizen of the country’s leading local authority after this? Aside from anything else he has infected the Mayor’s post unambiguously with the disease of national politics instead of concentrating his mind on specific local matters. Where Georgetown is concerned, he should allow the PPP/C to show its political bias, but for his part he should retain a professional stance. One can only assume that by coming onto the rally platform he is hoping the APNU councillors will vote him in as mayor again.
In general, if the views expressed at this rally reflect the stance of the entire central executive of the PNCR, both leadership and challengers, then it seems the party is making little progress. Generalisations which are not backed up by evidence of any shape, size or form, count only in this instance as divisive tactics, and the constant racial references could facilitate the evolution of a perilous context. It is not that there is any shortage of issues about which the PPP/C can be criticised, and who knows, perhaps some of these relate to corruption while they certainly do to politics; it is just that the opposition party is not addressing any of them.
It will cause the electorate to feel that it lacks anyone of sufficient capacity to study the problems in detail, put forward alternative solutions and ask serious questions about what the government is doing – or not doing, as the case may be. In other words, Congress Place should not be surprised if the public considers that the party lacks the skills among its complement to be in government in the future. It is quite simple: modern government requires competence.
If the polemics at the rally were foolishness, they did not stop there. Foolishness morphed into the ridiculous when US Ambassador to Guyana Sarah-Ann Lynch was accused of assisting in the installation of the current administration. Back here in Guyana that might have evoked little more than a yawn, were it not for the fact that GOAR seems to have persuaded US Democratic Congressman Hakeem Jeffries that Ambassador Lynch should go.
“It is time for the Biden administration to act … and the first thing that I think that the Biden administration needs to do is to get rid of the Trump-appointed Ambassador to Guyana,” he was reported as saying, adding that he and his colleagues, “stand in solidarity with each and every one of you to deal with the situation down in Guyana …“We will not tolerate racism, intolerance, hatred, xenophobia, racially motivated violence, discrimination and injustice,” he said before leading a chant of “Sarah must go”. The only consolation where this codswallop is concerned is that now we know some US Congressmen are no better at doing their homework than are our own parliamentarians. Fortunately, the infinitely better informed US State Department is unlikely to take the naïve Mr Jeffries seriously.
Since the PNCR thinks it is so powerful it can get rid of Ambassador Lynch, perhaps it might move on to Baroness Scotland, the Secretary General of the Commonwealth, or Mr Luis Almagro, the Secretary General of the OAS, or Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados, or Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent, or any number of people and heads of organizations and nations which recognised the 2020 election as free and fair. The question is, how does the party think that even if it could get Ambassador Lynch recalled, this would change the world’s perception about the conduct of last year’s poll? If it might appear to have a crisis of competence, it would certainly appear to have a crisis of recognising reality.
