It has been said that “politics makes strange bedfellows” and this adage has certainly been reinforced by recent local developments on the political front. Who would have ever believed that a party which was such a fierce opponent of the People’s National Congress (PNC) would have ended up in the same political bed with that party, which was also responsible for the death of the leader of the Working People’s Alliance and one of Guyana’s most brilliant academic sons, Dr Walter Rodney and other activists of the party.
Who would have expected that a WPA top gun would have become the prime ministerial candidate of a PNCR-led alliance?
Who would have expected that this top gun would have shared the same political platform with a man who was a senior member in the leadership of the army which was integrally involved in the rigging of elections in Guyana and which was responsible for the death of two People’s Progressive Party (PPP) activists when they attempted to prevent the seizure of ballot boxes on the Corentyne?
Who would have believed the PNCR would have embraced the WPA which its founder-leader had vowed to destroy by declaring “its (government) steel is sharper” and describing the party as the “Worst Possible Alternative.”?
But that is the reality of Guyanese politics which we have to live with. Inevitably, the post-elections period which is with us has seen some interesting developments, one of which is the apparent feud between APNU and the AFC on a consensual candidate for the Speaker of the National Assembly, as both sides are insisting on their choice for the post.
And APNU’s Dr Rupert Roopnarine  made this serious difference between the two opposition parties publicly known when he declared that the kind of “rigidity” being shown by the AFC is not helpful for negotiations on the matter of electing a Speaker of the National Assembly.
Interestingly, APNU is projecting itself as being more flexible by declaring that it is willing to have a rotating Speakership, but it should have the first term.
One question that comes to mind is why the insistence on the first term. This leads to the issue of trust and certainly this must be going through the minds of the AFC leadership, because what happens if APNU refuses to give up the post when the agreed term is up. And this is not far-fetched thinking because there were similar instances in the past – one of them was the Mayorship of Georgetown following the local government election in 1994.
No party had won a majority, as what happened at our recent national elections and it was agreed to have a rotating Mayorship. The PNC and the GGG had their terms and when it was the PPP’s turn the PNC said there was no such agreement and as such they[the PPP] never held the Mayorship.
So the lesson of political trust is a well-learnt one and this will further widen the crack between the two opposition parties as the insistence by sides on their candidates is a clear indication of political distrust, which is not surprising when one considers the players that make up the two political entities. They are either rejects, opportunists or both.
The tripartite initiative is also another case in which an agreement is not being honoured, as it seems that APNU and the AFC are having separate discussions and negotiations exclusive of the PPP.
Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon, puts it succinctly when he declared: “The apparent abandonment of consensus seeking embodied in the notions of the Tripartite Initiative does not augur well for the future. Other than a duel fist fight, there is nothing much left for them (APNU and AFC) to register their disagreements about.”
Luncheon continued: “The Tripartite Initiative evolved a flurry of expectations of consummating energies that should be used productively…it was waylaid. My own impression is that APNU and AFC got together and thought it would have been rather simple to gang-up on the governing party and to present us with, essentially, a fait accompli and to restore some ‘bilaterality’ in this engagement, government versus opposition.”
According to Dr. Luncheon, the forging of alliance by the opposition parties against the PPP/C is proving much more difficult.