DR. WALTER Rodney, brilliant and charismatic leader of the Working People’s Alliance, had become a thorn in the side of Forbes Burnham and a threat to the PNC dictatorship, so he was eliminated out of the equation.Dr. Rupert Roopnarine joined with the alleged (openly charged by many at the Rodney Commission of Inquiry) murderers of his former colleague, and has paid a price; a heavy price indeed. It is a price, in one form or another, that those pledging loyalty to the PNC has paid. Here, one needs to take cognizance of the fate of Vincent Teekah, Peter D’Aguiar, and even stalwarts who joined the PNC ranks, such as Vanessa Kissoon, the late Winston Murray, the Lindeners, Vincent Alexander, Faith Harding, Aubrey Norton, Sharma Solomon, et al; even Raphael Trotman, all of whom were treated as “collateral damage” by the PNC leadership. Rupert Roopnarine has become the latest statistic in a long line of persons discarded for political expediency by the PNC. Some are saying that it serves him right for putting his hand in the jaws of the tiger that ate Rodney’s aspirations for a better, united and progressive Guyana, because history does not lie; and Roopnarine has lived that history, and experienced the sharp sword of the PNC, thus his being discarded for someone who is expected to ‘bring more Indian votes’ to the PNC should have been expected.
Wolves can camouflage their reality with name changes, but they cannot change their nature of the ferocious, feral predisposition of a carnivorous creature; so Roopnarine’s Prime Ministerial position (sic!) has been devoured by a union of convenience, formulated to fool the voting public into thinking that the PNC’s new combo has reconstituted and reinvented its dark and destructive reality through this infusion of Nagamootoo and company into its ranks.
However, the PPP/C needs to be on guard against the PNC’s propensity for rigging elections, given the fact that the PPP/C did not in actuality lose its majority at the last elections, but was robbed of it because votes from 19 polling stations in a PPP/C stronghold had been withheld from being counted by a PNC polling agent. And what is more, this was known to GECOM.
Even their own Party members have consistently accused the PNC of rigging internal elections at their successive congresses, as is attested to in a subsequent media report, where Sharma Solomon complained bitterly about the lack of democratic processes in choosing Party leaders.
According to the report, “Region 10 Member of the People’s National Congress Reform (PNC/R), Sharma Solomon, a week after the conclusion of the Party’s 18th Biennial Congress, has stated that there was nothing democratic about the electoral process.
“Solomon released a statement to this effect (yesterday), and while he did not state definitively the lack of democracy in the election process, the series of events outlined by the politician pointed to that…. Solomon opined that with the PNC/R being a Party vying for the seat of government, it should stick to the philosophy of its Founder Leader Forbes Burnham, which is that ‘there is no better way of leading than by example.’”
The Report continued, “According to Solomon, the Secretariat’s decision to approve the use of national identification card or passport as a means of identification opened the electoral process for manipulation, because these documents do not have the needed information to prove membership and eligibility as delegates.
“He said that the non-issuance of cards affected a significant portion of Linden’s members and delegates.
“Also, Solomon highlighted that he was nominated for the positions of Leader, Chairman, Vice-Chairman (VC) and Committee Member. But the letter sent to him excluded the nomination for VC.
“He claimed that the secretariat was advised of the oversight, with the accompanied evidence attached but this was never corrected as the nomination was not reflected on the ballot.”
It is rightly said that politics makes for strange bedfellows. This marriage of political convenience between PNC/APNU and the AFC has created one of the strangest concubinage ever in the history of this country.