A REGIONAL executive member of the Alliance For Change party (AFC), Region Six Councillor, Haseef Yusuf, has brought to public attention that party’s cronyism and lack of transparency and accountability in its hierarchy, highlighting same in letters to the Guyanese media.

Yusuf has taken the AFC leadership to task over its hypocrisy. He stated that that party’s leaders are harassing the Government in Parliament on charges that they cannot prove, whereas their own actions cannot bear scrutiny; and he advised: “It is time to take out the beam from thine own eyes”.

It is a shame and disgrace for the AFC to be working against the very principles which it claims to stand for, he posits.

Yusuf asks, “Where is the accountability within the AFC? Where is the transparency in the electoral process? Isn’t there cronyism within the AFC? (Are you) afraid of another defection if you drop the hammer?”

He also expressed doubt whether Ramjattan has the courage to act decisively in these matters, since the AFC front-bencher has brushed off his concerns by saying he is “too busy”. So if he is too busy to deal with corruption in his own party, how will he run a country with a myriad of agencies in which corruption has become endemic since PNC days, and in which corruption has become so entrenched that it has become near-impossible to root out?

The AFC is another arm to break up the PPP support base and give the PNC power once more; and they have certainly succeeded. Persons like Yusuf should not complain, because Guyana’s history is there for the reading, but they have chosen to join the wolves in sheep’s clothing. But today the wolves are devouring each other in order to gain the spoils.

Ramjattan was promised leadership of the party on a rotational basis, but Trotman has never relinquished that position, so Ramjattan is being sidelined, first by Trotman, now by Nigel Hughes. To the AFC members in the diaspora, it seems as if Ramjattan is left to do the dirty work of the puppeteers who are drawing his strings.
Moses Nagamootoo wanted the presidency, and the final rejection of his candidacy by the PPP/C sent the self-appointed deliverer into the embrace of the AFC with the promise of “a high place” and a vice-presidency.

Both aspiring presidents are today sitting on the sidelines, refusing to accept that they were used by a clever strategist who is just as power-hungry and manipulative as they are, but who has proven to be cleverer than they are.

Nagamootoo was not even given the speakership position to which he had aspired when Trotman’s promises of a vice-presidency and “a high place” did not fructify, because Trotman had cut a secret deal with the PNC to reject him in return for AFC support in Parliament.

AFC member Patterson, not attaining the appointment of commissioner on GECOM, does not bother Trotman, because his loyalty is not to the AFC, but to the PNC, and the AFC was merely a vehicle to enable the PNC to take control of Parliament. It was a brilliant strategy indeed, similar to those used by Burnham; and the pawns were PPP/C defectors who were used both to wean PPP/C supporters away from their party and to get funding from wealthy businessmen who trusted and sympathized with Ramjattan and Nagamootoo. But then Trotman never made secret his ardent admiration of Burnham, the master political strategist.

However, PPP defectors to the AFC have to be blind not to recognise the trend. Gaumattie Singh was denied a parliamentary seat because Trotman chose Chantal Smith instead. Trotman has always been leader of the AFC since inception, despite the co-leadership premise on which it was founded, with Ramjattan always having been left floundering in the cold, and Nagamootoo was denied the Speaker’s position.

Guess who holds both positions coveted by Ramjattan and Nagamootoo? Trotman, of course, because he has been revealed to have been holding secret talks with the hierarchy of the PNC, the beast out of whose belly he emerged. And ironically, it is the PPP/C support base that is being eroded to ultimately empower the PNC, and former PPP supporters in the diaspora and the business world who are funding them. Michael Forde, Bholanauth Parmanand and Jagan Ramessar must be turning in their graves.
Maybe there would be many more like Gaumattie Singh and Yusuf, who would realise the colossal mistake they have made in trying to deliver this nation into the jaws of the wolves in sheep’s clothing, because the wolves are already devouring each other, merely waiting for the day when the treasury is delivered to them before they begin swallowing the spoils.

Immigration consultant Balwant Persaud is asking: If Ramjattan, Hughes, Nagamootoo and the other leaders of the AFC spent their own money (which they could afford), what happened to the donation of $115 million that was handed over to them, not to mention the massive amounts collected from their very wealthy overseas supporters and from businessmen in Guyana, along with the proceeds from fund-raisers held by ordinary supporters like Yusuf?

Ramjattan is arrogantly and contemptuously asking what Yusuf donated (meaning: why should he question Ramaya?), so the ordinary supporter like Yusuf, who worked hard and long hours, neglecting their families and their work in the process, have no value in the eyes of Ramjattan.

They hardly ran advertisements for elections 2011, because most of their public relations work was done by their supporters in the media, including Ramaya and foot soldiers like Yusuf. Few billboards and hardly any flyers were circulated, so Balwant Persaud and Yusuf could rightly ask what happened to all the hundreds of millions of donation funding.

Most of the opposition campaign was conducted via relentless legwork of their supporters, with donations of resources like sound systems and vehicles provided free every time they called a meeting.
Their supporters, who had been fooled by the fancy talk of these erstwhile messiahs who promised to deliver them from the terrible PPP, are, in Ramjattan’s language, “collateral damage”.

So, just as Trotman fooled Ramjattan and Nagamootoo into joining AFC with promises of co-leadership and ‘a high place’, so did the duo fool PPP supporters to win their trust, their votes, their help, and their resources.

Today, like Yusuf, Gaumattie Singh and thousands of other supporters whom the AFC caused to lose their jobs through their infamous budgetary cuts, are left holding, in the now famous words of President Donald Ramotar, “larwah!”

The only difference is that, today, big shots like Ramjattan, Nagamootoo and Ramayyah are sitting cool in Parliament, drawing all the parliamentary benefits, including duty-free vehicles, while their supporters are left “high and dry” like the Amerindians, Yusuf and Gaumattie Singh. Their contempt for the workers, whose rights they said they were representing to win their support and their votes, was evident when Ramjattan, upon being reminded that their actions in Parliament would make many workers be forced out of their jobs, said, “Well, if they gotta go, then they gotta go,” while calling them collateral damage.

Public servants have always been betrayed by the PNC, as they have been once again, this time joined by the AFC; but time and again they have responded to calls of “kith and kin”, disregarding their own welfare and that of their children and future generations, and one wonders when their good sense will prevail and they will recognise the wolves in sheep’s clothing who perennially fleece them of their trust and their votes.

As Yusuf noted, in any other country, the misuse and abuse of campaign funds are dealt with criminally, especially where a person is making unsubstantiated claims in order to enrich himself or herself; whereas in Guyana such a person will be promoted to high office. It is a well-known fact that troublemakers in the society who aspired to the hallowed halls of the National Assembly, or higher offices, were bribed with parliamentary seats, a vice-presidency, or a co-leadership position to join the AFC. The Gaumattie Singh imbroglio should have warned persons like Yusuf what to expect from the AFC.