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FM
Former Member

Surely the PNC in 1970 was not the PNC in 1988, and is not the PNC in 2015

August 29, 2015 | By | Filed Under Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon 

 

Is political analysis best left to historians and those who study political theory? If the answer is yes, then no one will accept that, because not only is it chauvinistic but one is bound to ask the question – why can’t an editor or a long-serving state actor though not trained in political theory, make learned analysis about political developments in his/her country.

There are always the weak points that show up though, when others not schooled in history try to interpret current political issues without regard to the main ingredients in history.

 

PNC member Sherwood Lowe rightfully took issue with the Stabroek News over its July 26 editorial which included the following statement about the PNC, “As it is they run the danger of reviving a deep-rooted fear in some segments of the population, that no matter what is said to the contrary, the old PNC’s penchant for the authoritarian approach is still alive underneath the surface.”

 

The historian is bound to disagree with Stabroek News’ assessment. The weak points are too glaring. First, the PNC of 1970 was not the PNC under Hoyte. The PNC under Hoyte proved to be the most fair-minded government Guyana produced (with some bad areas of course like neglect for the African–Guyanese in the public service and sugar workers). The theory just cannot hold up that we in Guyana have to watch the PNC in the coalition regime at the moment because lurking around is the old PNC’s inclination to hog power.

 

But the PNC under Hoyte did not hog power, it in fact gave it away to the PPP. How then can one refer to the old authoritarian approach of the PNC that may still be around?

 

I doubt any other party would have conceded power the way Hoyte did in 1992. It was under Hoyte that the Chairman of the Elections Commission came from the nomination of the opposition parties. It was under the PNC Government during the Hoyte era that a Vice-President was charged for alleged criminal behaviour. It was the PNC Government that gave permission for the registration and legalization of the Stabroek News.

 

One must compare the PNC’s concession to Jimmy Carter as against Jagan’s refusal to leave government after he lost the elections in 1964. It was under the PNC Government that the enormous tentacles of the state were curtailed. The PNC Government from 1987 to 1992 removed the prodigious control of the PNC Government of the economy. Certainly this could not have been a party that has inherent authoritarian tendencies. When one examines the divestment policies in the Economic Recovery Programme under the PNC administration, 1985-1992, the power of the PNC in both the government and the society were reduced to a mere footnote. That is a contradiction if one accepts the Stabroek News’ position that the PNC has old tyrannical habits.

 

Secondly, the Stabroek News contends that there is a “deep-seated fear” in some segments of the country about the PNC’s dictatorship instincts. The obvious rebuttal to that point is in the form of a question – which segment of the Guyanese citizenry feels so? The editorial is pointing to sections of the East Indian population. Those sections will see the PNC in the same way they saw it even if the PNC leaders all become Popes and Saints.

 

Thirdly, isn’t the Stabroek playing the Draculean ethnic game? I doubt very much that in 2015 even two percent of the African people of Guyana see an authoritarian temptation lurking inside the PNC. It means then we are using ethnic criteria to judge the PNC in 2015.

 

Fourthly, depending on the methodology one uses, one will see an unchanging PNC from 1957 onwards. The facts to repel such arid theorizing are mountainous. If the essentialist approach in studying the PNC is ditched in preference for the dialectical method, then the PNC of the seventies is long gone. Even in terms of personalities, only two figures from that era are actively around – Hamilton Green and Oscar Clarke. Both have no authority in shaping the anatomy of the PNC.

 

Four graphic facts point to a politically superior PNC that has left the autocratic ways of the seventies. One is the Hoyte Government. Two is the Corbin decision to merge the PNC with other groupings. Three is the open challenge for leadership within the PNC which led to stalwarts like Faith Harding being openly critical. Surely, dictatorial entities do not go in that democratic direction.

 

Finally, the Granger/Harmon leadership is a far better organism than when the PNC existed in the seventies.

Replies sorted oldest to newest

Originally Posted by VishMahabir:

Granger is the ultimate PNC element from that time...the holder of many of the PNC ideas as practiced under Burnham.

Please identify the Burnhamesque qualities of this mild mannered Granger, who certainly seems to be a far cry from the smirking arrogance of  Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham, AKA as Machiavelli,  the Prince of Darkness.

 

You will be doing a great national service to the people of Guyana.

 

Hopefully you aren't like those GOP fanatics who scream that Obama is an Anti Christ Muslim.

FM
Last edited by Former Member
Originally Posted by VishMahabir:

Granger is the ultimate PNC element from that time...the holder of many of the PNC ideas as practiced under Burnham.

suh, explain to me how Granger is a communist

 

then elaborate on the other Burnhamite elements yuh see

 

being 'blackman' doan count, arite?

FM
Last edited by Former Member
Originally Posted by redux:
Originally Posted by VishMahabir:

Granger is the ultimate PNC element from that time...the holder of many of the PNC ideas as practiced under Burnham.

suh, explain to me how Granger is a communist

Indeed I do have some concerns about APNU/AFC, but Burnham like characteristics isn't one of them.

 

Try more like an apparent lack of preparedness at the reading of the National Budget.

FM
Originally Posted by redux:
Originally Posted by ksazma:
Freddie Kissoon, Chief Apologist.

for what?

What they really mean, they will never say.

 

What VishMahabir, and ksazma really want to say is Freddie K is an apologist for blackman.

 

Because surely they would have cited specific Burnham like qualities that Granger is manifesting if they really thought so.

 

I see that the Indo supremacists seem just as irate at the election of a black man in Guyana, as the white supremacists were when Obama was elected.

FM
Last edited by Former Member

Became President

In 1980 a new constitutional amendment that made the country a semipresidential democratic republic allowed Burnham to assume some of the pomp and trappings of the office. Again, allegations surfaced of widespread vote fraud in that year's election following a report by a team of international observers. Official results gave Burnham 76 percent of the vote, with longtime nemesis Jagan receiving just 20 percent. Election observers contended that Indo-Guyanese voters were prevented from voting at polling stations in several places.

In October of 1983 U.S. military forces invaded the Caribbean island nation of Grenada to oust Marxist dictator Maurice Bishop, who had been in power since 1979 and had strengthened Grenada's relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union. Guyana also had close ties to Bishop's regime and denounced the maneuver. In another interview with the New York Times, Burnham scoffed at the stated justification for the invasion—that Grenada's ties to Cuba, and through it the Soviet Union, posed a threat to democracy in the Caribbean. “The threat,” Burnham told Meislin, “was that if the Grenadians succeeded in transforming their economy, other countries in that position might say that this ideology or that economic tactic on the part of Grenada must be good. There's nothing in international law that says that's a good reason for invading.”

Few visitors to Guyana would have believed that Burnham's own prescription for economic success was working. Emigration continued to increase, with the remaining Indo-Guyanese overseeing a pitifully diminished private sector. In its state-controlled economy the government was the country's largest employer, and Afro-Guyanese held the majority of jobs. The media was also controlled by the government, and television broadcasting still had not come to the nation by 1983 except in the form of unreliable pirate stations. Political dissent was nonexistent when the government controlled all media, and it was further suppressed by economic means, Jagan and other foes of Burnham claimed, because most employed Guyanese remained politically inactive for fear of losing their jobs. Again, Burnham stated that he ruled legitimately, with the support of the majority. “An oppressive Government cannot last this long,” he declared to New York Times's Meislin. “We don't have the financial accouterments for a police state.”

Fears of Cultlike Group

Guyana actually had little financial wherewithal at all after the costs of maintaining the army and other instruments of control were funded. The country was saddled with a massive foreign debt, and the continuing import restrictions made some types of items, such as toilet paper, extremely hard to obtain. Furthermore, Burnham's odd alliances with fringe groups had not abated after the Jonestown disaster. “On the streets, people speak fearfully of the House of Israel,” wrote Meislin, who described the group as “a religious sect of several thousand Guyanese headed by a man who calls himself Rabbi Washington but is really a fugitive from the United States named David Hill.” The New York Times report continued, “There is a widespread belief among Guyanese that the group operates as a paramilitary squad for the Government.” Hill was wanted on corporate fraud charges and had gained some eight thousand Afro-Guyanese followers with a doctrine asserting that blacks were the original tribes of Israel and that Christianity was a tool of oppression.

Burnham's twenty-one-year rule ended on August 6, 1985, when he died of heart failure during throat surgery. The operation, which was conducted by Cuban doctors, took place at a hospital in Georgetown. Burnham's survivors were three daughters from his 1951 marriage to Sheila Bernice Lataste and another two daughters and a son from his 1967 union with Viola Victorine Harper, who served as his vice president. His replication of certain Soviet-style customs continued even after his death, when according to his instructions he was enclosed in a tomb made of purple glass—his favorite color—modeled after the one in Moscow that had held Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin since his 1924 death. A glass coffin installed in a botanical garden exposed to the strength of the sun in near-equatorial Guyana quickly proved to be an unwise idea: Even though a refrigeration unit was used, Guyana's electrical capacity was so spotty that the cooling unit often shut down. A mausoleum at the site was later constructed, after Burnham's body was sent to Moscow for re-embalming.

FM
Originally Posted by Anan:

Became President

In 1980 a new constitutional amendment that made the country a semipresidential democratic republic allowed Burnham to assume some of the pomp and trappings of the office. Again, allegations surfaced of widespread vote fraud in that year's election following a report by a team of international observers. Official results gave Burnham 76 percent of the vote, with longtime nemesis Jagan receiving just 20 percent. Election observers contended that Indo-Guyanese voters were prevented from voting at polling stations in several places . . .

someone please help me understand what this 'article' about Burnham's communism and his 'badness' has to do with David Granger and the thread topic

 

it's scary . . . the reasons some posters here totally lose their logic and common sense

FM
Last edited by Former Member

dis cowardly punk anan now reduced to posting wan wan pictures winking at received wisdom of his comrade bigots in lieu of argument

 

what an antiman

FM
Last edited by Former Member
Originally Posted by yuji22:

Is that Granger bowing down and kissing his hero Burnham ?

at least he is not crawling on his knees with mouth open wide like u, approaching some nasty ole skont at de rat's mansion with he buckta pulled down to his ankles

 

rite?

FM
Originally Posted by redux:
Originally Posted by yuji22:

Is that Granger bowing down and kissing his hero Burnham ?

at least he is not crawling on his knees with mouth open wide like u, approaching some nasty ole skont at de rat's mansion with he buckta pulled down to his ankles

 

rite?

Yuji would rather Granger engage on what ever "creative stuff" which Bobby and Bharat do behind closed doors. 

 

Do they ask why Jagdeo had a problem with his bowels and Bobby had to take him to Florida, at taxpayers's expense?

FM
Originally Posted by Ramakant-P:

Bringing up past inconsistencies by the PPP will not cut it and it will not hide the fact that the Alliance is corrupt.

what are u talking about fool?

 

do you have any idea what this thread topic is?

 

step away from the bottle already . . . jeeez!

 

FM
Last edited by Former Member
Originally Posted by KishanB:
Originally Posted by yuji22:
Originally Posted by Anan:

 

Is that Granger bowing down and kissing his hero Burnham ?

What shyte you posting here YUJI?

This was Burnham jhumbie resurrection day, did you not hear, it was second to Granger big jamboree.

FM

“I am not Burnham, I am David Granger, the President of the future”

“I am not Burnham, I am David Granger, the President of the future”

Speaking before hundreds of Guyanese nationals in Queens, New York  on Sunday afternoon, Presidential Candidate for the APNU+AFC coalition, retired Brigadier David Granger declared that he is the President of the future and will not be one who will get stuck in the past.

At the Town Hall style meeting, Granger was asked directly how can he assure Guyanese that the country would not return to the days of late President Forbes Burnham who died 30 years ago.

“I am not Burnham. I am David Granger”, he declared to loud applause as he reminded that “Forbes Burnham died 30 years ago in 1985, and I am the President of the future and I am leading Guyana into the future. I am not leading Guyana back into the past and I have at my side, Moses Nagamootoo and both of us are living for the future not the past”.

Mr. Granger told the Guyanese gathered that a government under his watch would make Guyana safe again for investment and their families. He said over the past years, the PPP Civic administration has failed to address the crime problem in the country as it continues to ignore the Disciplined Services report and international recommendations.  IMG_3208

He said Guyana sees robberies every single day and the problem cannot be ignored as it remains a threat to investment and the country’s development.

The New York area is home to the largest number of Guyanese migrants in the United States. It is estimated that there may well be more than 500,000 Guyanese living in North America alone. Granger told the Queens, New York meeting that “I know you want to go back, but you want to be safe and the person to make you safe is standing right before you”.

“We know the problems that Guyana is suffering from now and we want to guarantee you security. We want to guarantee your safety and that will be guaranteed by this government of national unity.”

The Presidential Candidate said it is time for Guyana to be transformed and the APNU+AFC coalition is ready with that transformation.  He told the gathering that poverty remains a major  problem in the country and human development will be the cornerstone of a Granger administration. He said the high number of school drop outs and single parent homes cannot be ignored. Education, he believes, will play the greatest role in the transformation of Guyana.

IMG_3180Mr. Granger said the coalition will continue to speak about national unity because Guyana is divided at this stage and there must be a healing of that division. He noted that the division has prevented the development of Guyana.

He reflected on the problems being faced by  many persons in the indigenous community who are faced with the export of raw resources as poverty continues to hit the hinterland communities.

He said while foreign companies are allowed to export thousands of logs, indigenous residents have seen their efforts to earn a living by smaller means completely destroyed.

Granger asked members of the Queens community to work along with the APNU+AFC coalition. He told them that  he wants them to return to help in Guyana’s development but the effort must be made by all. He called for a greater partnership as elections approaches.

According to the Presidential Candidate, he will not be doing it alone.

“I am not  a lone ranger, Granger is not a stranger, I am not a danger, I am a game changer and on May 11, the game will be changed”, the APNU+AFC Presidential Candidate declared.

Filed: 23rd March, 2015

Coverage of Campaign on the Road…Guyana Elections 2015

FM

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