Dear Editor,
As someone inspired by Burnham during my youth, who ate his fair share of the PNC’s cook-up during their political meetings attended by my father and myself in the 1970s at Alleyne’s High School, also as a Guyanese who lived first-hand through recent attempts by the APNU-AFC to overturn the results of the 2020 National Elections, I consider it a great responsibility to share my thoughts on Aubrey Norton’s recent declaration at the PNCR’s General Congress on August 06, 2022 (SN Aug 08/22) for the party to ‘slip into campaign mode’.
Norton and I have known each other since the middle 1990’s when I attended some of the Party’s meetings. He was always a brilliant man, someone who commanded attention, respect, someone to be listened to, although I think his recent posturing with the President has brought much of this into question. His further educational achievements have surely put him in a position where he understands perfectly Guyana’s economics, as well as the road to national development and prosperity now made so much easier with our new-found oil wealth.
This said, I find it difficult, impossible, for anyone with a modicum of common sense, a sense of justice, not to mention an accomplished politician as Norton himself is, to remain with, be a part of a political machinery which as recently as two years ago, held this country over a barrel once again in its failed attempt to rig our national elections, an event which has become part and parcel of the existence of the PNC(R). Just as bad was the AFC which went hand in hand in the 2020 elections sham, leaving the supporters it won for itself going into the 2015 elections nonplussed, with sore regrets for ever countenancing supporting them in the first place.
Without a doubt there is much need for political parties, political representation in Guyana, but I think the last thing Guyana needs right now is a political party which blew its second, and I am almost certain, final attempt for the next two generations at least, to provide proper government and run off a national election without rigging it. The PNCR, its supporters, need to do a reality check, some careful introspection on what happened during the PNCR’s last five years in administration, because many of these very supporters were left with the proverbial white-mouth as some of their very lives, means of earning a living, were uprooted and thrown into the fire by the then administration, not to mention the dashed hopes of the many invisible, forgotten Guyanese around the country.
It will be hard to forget the Stabroek vendor on television explaining how the APNU-AFC’s decision to relocate him and the other vendors without consultation destroyed his life and that of his family because as a consequence he was unable to pay his mortgage. More importantly, they need to seriously examine and grade themselves on ethics and governance issues, because where everyone thought the PPP was bad, the APNU-AFC administration demonstrated they had no limit, there was nothing they could not do. Their introspection should bring to the surface their numerous failures, the unforgivable one being the elections fiasco.
I am sure Norton knows that his party doesn’t have a hope in hell of ever winning another national election, because after the APNU-AFC’s contract with Exxon and company for the Government of Guyana’s Minister of Finance to pay Exxon’s income taxes, after scuttling an opportunity for better wages and salaries by public servants in 2019, telling Guyanese to go sell plantain chips, after trodden on the lives of vendors at Stabroek market, not batting an eye on the welfare of municipal workers, after trying to rig another election in this 21st century, just it seems to show how it’s done, our choices should become clearer. The PNC gave Guyana and Guyanese a trashing in their 28 years of rigged elections and bad government.
Older Guyanese, along with the new generation, were barely spared another trashing in 2020. Norton knows the PNCR has done irreparable harm to itself, to the extent where I personally see it as an interest group, a viable group nonetheless, with representatives in Guyana’s Parliament, but an interest group which will never win another election. The sooner traditional PNC supporters realize this, the better. Keep away from attempts to get drawn into ethnic politics. Our Buxtonians, children from a line of heroic, courageous fighters, can give us all a good lesson on this.
Sincerely,
Craig Sylvester