APNU-AFC as a coalition party is not new; it was not born on February 14, 2015; all it did on that February 14 was to make the secret public, in order to have increased populous visibility.

APNU-AFC already was a coalition party at the declaration of the 2011 General and Regional Elections’ results, and the activation of its engines of resistance for the sake of resistance against the PPP/C’s agenda began in full swing.

And there is this feeling, too, that all that APNU-AFC wants is bad news for Guyana just for the sake of placing the PPP/C Government in a bad light.

Soldiering with a one-seat parliamentary majority, APNU and AFC hatched a strategy from the onset of their tenure to obstruct the PPP/C Government’s development plans, and to bring the PPP/C Government down to its knees before the due date of the next statutory elections in 2016.

This position is not difficult to surmise. Scanning APNU-AFC long-winded speeches, its poor outcomes, and its impact on the nation in the 10th Parliament would produce this conclusion.

This APNU-AFC’s behaviour invokes the Republican Party ugliness that U.S. President Barack Obama faced when he won a landslide in 2008, and a resistance which he still faces today.

Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland asserted that the Republican Party agenda is an anti-Obama agenda. This ugliness against Obama’s agenda has transformed the Republican Party into a party of ‘NO’.

In the National Journal of October 23, 2010, then minority Republican Party Senate Leader Mitch McConnell indicated his intention to make Obama a one-term President. A Time article ‘The Party of No’, stated that the then House of Representatives Republican Party Chief Whip Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell engineered an all-out resistance to Obama, where the Republican Party used obstruction of Obama’s initiatives as a strategy to enable Obama to fail as the President.
In Obama’s first term in office and in this his ongoing second term, Republicans in both Houses of Congress (House of Representatives and Senate) have demonstrated a history of resistance to the Obama agenda. Nowadays, Republicans are resisting Obama’s Executive Order invoking new immigration rules for illegal immigrants, Obama’s negotiation with Iran, the healthcare reform, many appointees of the Obama Administration, etc.
In fact, on ABC’s ‘This Week’ on January 25, 2015, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal confirmed that the Republican Party was a party of ‘NO’ and that there is now the need to replace this ‘NO’.
Would you not say that this Republican Party’s resistance against the Obama agenda has strong resonance with Guyana’s APNU-AFC’s parliamentary behaviour? APNU-AFC Party’s ugliness has transformed it into a party of ‘NO’, for its agenda since the start of the 10th Parliament, definitively, has been an anti-PPP/C agenda. How so?
Concluding agreements in the National Assembly regularly became a predictable ‘NO’ against the Government. This conclusion is not hard to ‘sus’ out. The 10th Parliament was plagued with a one-seat majority Opposition – APNU and AFC – armed with ambitious perceptions and wild expectations of controlling the ruling PPP/C agenda and programme of activities. Indeed, the PPP/C parliamentarians rejected and defeated APNU-AFC’s stance of wanting to be the de facto executive.
In the lawlessness that passed for parliamentary proceedings in the 10th Parliament, matters of national importance lost their way through APNU-AFC’s parliamentary talking points and translation.
For instance, in the PPP/C Government’s struggles to update and offer the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Amendment Bill to the Paris Plenary of the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force, at the eleventh hour, the leading Opposition Party APNU tabled amendments. APNU’s delaying tactics impeded parliamentary progress and agreement on the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Amendment Bill.
And in its haste to oppose the PPP/C’s agenda merely for the sake of opposing, APNU-AFC’s obstruction has hurt many of the PPP/C’s capital projects. For instance, since 2011, APNU-AFC plotted budget cuts on a number of public capital investments, such as the Cheddi Jagan Airport Modernisation Project, Ogle Aerodrome assistance, Civil Aviation equipment and Hinterland/Coastal Airstrips, among others, and effectively terminated the Amaila Hydropower Project. These capital projects, if successfully operational, would increase employment in Guyana.
Given this condition, APNU-AFC seems to be in coalition with international capitalist forces to further neoliberalism in Guyana. The fundamental principle governing neoliberalism is the view that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector, and that the role of government should be marginal.
Under such conditions and evidenced in neoliberal health reforms in other countries, neoliberalism brings a developing trend toward greater inequality, and an increase in the gap between the rich and the poor. Through its one-seat majority in the 10th Parliament, APNU-AFC exerted efforts to marginalise the PPP/C Government and, perhaps, to promote the application of neoliberalism in Guyana’s development.
And so to the delight of the nation, the prorogation of Parliament on November 11, 2014, the announcement of the May 11, 2015 General and Regional Elections, and the dissolution of Parliament on February 28, 2015, ended the constant APNU-AFC’s parliamentary ramblings; which invariably had ‘NO’ as its pre-planned outcome for every major submission the PPP/C presented to Parliament. But APNU-AFC ramblings continue apace through the new opposition. Let me explain.
In addition to the established APNU-AFC opposition, there is a new opposition, inclusive of some private media houses and some parts of so-called civil society that have always been an appendix of APNU-AFC and the PNC. This new opposition now provides the medium for APNU-AFC’s purported populist speeches, chockfull of sound and thunder, but telling little or nothing, except considerable misinformation.
And what is interesting about this new opposition is its daily letters, sometimes with more than one author, attacking the PPP/C Government with little more than rhetoric as evidence; what also is interesting about this new opposition is its attempt to be the spokesperson for APNU-AFC as if the APNU-AFC has no leader. And in the 10th Parliament, sometimes it was unclear as to who the leader of the Opposition was as the parliamentary ramblings and battles occurred.
Then, since the one-seat majority APNU-AFC did not win any battles in the National Assembly, notwithstanding their stance as the Party of ‘No’, their winning the war on May 11 is a distinct no-no. (First published in: themisirpost.wordpress.com)

‘…in the 10th Parliament, sometimes it was unclear as to who the leader of the Opposition was as the parliamentary ramblings and battles occurred. Then, since the one-seat majority APNU-AFC did not win any battles in the National Assembly, notwithstanding their stance as the Party of ‘No’, their winning the war on May 11 is a distinct no-no.’

By Dr. Prem Misir