RECENTLY, in addressing some issues relating to the upcoming local government elections, I severely castigated the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) for resorting to old political tricks and terror tactics.

Wondering why I should be so severe on my former party, someone observed: “But you were once PPP.” My response was that after the great Cheddi Jagan died, the soul of the party flickered for a while; then became unattractively dull. It became, not long afterwards, the pseudo PPP.

So, when I learned about the tactics of this post-Jagan PPP in the lead-up to local government elections, especially towards my village, I felt justified that I had distanced myself from this political rump.

TAMIL BIRTHPLACE
This contorted PPP, it appears, has made Whim, a tiny fishing village in Berbice, the battleground for the November 12 local government elections. The reasons are obvious: It has been traditionally a PPP stronghold; exclusively an Indo-Guyanese community and my “Tamil” birthplace.
A former Dutch estate, Whim was once populated predominantly by rebellious Madrasi immigrants, who were consigned to live near to newly freed African slaves. Their co-existence would become an epic story of inter-ethnic cooperation, which would be the subject of a future column.
But, by its own, Whim produced sterling local leadership. My Pa, his brother, Ramsammy (David Whitlingum); their cousin Jailall Bharrat; Permaul, Kassim and Seepersaud had, for many years, served as village leaders. They tried as best as they could, with limited resources, to improve conditions in the village.
When President Cheddi Jagan approached me in 1995 to become Minister of Local Government, my response was that I was hardly knowledgeable in this area. He replied, during a brief conversation at the National Park on May Day, that I should just follow what my father had done for his people.

PEOPLE’S POWER
I became, for the first time after 25 years, the Minister of Local Government with no ministry building and almost no staff, or vehicles. I walked into, and embraced, the grassroots. For me, local government was participatory democracy. It was people’s power!
I went down memory lane to figure out what has changed since I was removed as Local Government Minister. The evidence of neglect is as glaring as it is disgraceful in most Indo-Guyanese villages or neighbourhoods. As Vice-President, Khemraj Ramjattan observed yesterday, the PPP feels that it has transport to these villages and has sought to exercise ethnic dominance over them.
Now that the PPP is challenged, it has resorted to old political tricks and terror tactics, mainly against the small but strategic Alliance For Change (AFC), of which I am the “Party Elder.”
The evidence is abundant and credible that the PPP has cunningly planned a campaign to terrorise candidates and supporters of the AFC. Initially, it has deployed guerrilla methods to infiltrate and then sabotage.
I have credible information that before Nomination Day, known PPP activists begged to be placed on the AFC lists of candidates, but were rejected. Had they been included, they could have easily protested that they were coerced or bribed to become AFC candidates or backers, as we saw in the shameless midnight melodrama in Whim Wednesday last, when the permanent professional picketers besieged the office of the returning officer under the pretext that their signatures on AFC lists had been forged.

WICKED DEMANDS
Had the officials given in to their wicked demands to have backers removed, the AFC’s list of candidates could have been invalidated on the grounds that they included persons who were already PPP candidates. That was a ploy, a trap, to lure an unsuspecting party into the PPP’s end-game of ousting the AFC from the local polls, and accusing the Elections Commission of rigging the electoral processes or acting in “collusion.”
This was made very evident yesterday when the party’s members of the Elections Commission charged that there were “suspicious activities” regarding acceptance of nomination lists with alleged crooked signatures on behalf, and in support, of candidates for coalition parties. With an apparent straight face, one PPP zealot recklessly implicated the Guyana Elections Commission in what he described as “fears about collusion” with the government. And with a self-righteous judgment, he clumsily wielded the sledgehammer at the commission that “the machinery cannot be trusted …to deliver free, fair and transparent elections.”
That, to my mind, is what the post-Jagan, defeatist PPP wants to establish: That elections in Guyana are not credible.

THREATENED BY HACKS
Yesterday, Sita and I received in the prime minister’s yard several persons from our home villages, who confided that they have been threatened by PPP hacks. I recalled how, while I was in the PPP, there were campaigns to boycott the shops of persons who did not support the party, or had defected from it. Party supporters were told not to attend the jhandis of “PNC pundits” (who were dubbed “bandits”); not to attend their weddings, birthdays, nine-days; not even their funerals.
The post-Jagan PPP has re-invented that dastardly racist past, which is why a “big-mouth” party leader went on Berbice TV and, after identifying by names some AFC candidates who are my relatives, advised: “You know what to do.”
I hold him personally responsible if any harm should come to my family or relatives in Whim-Bloomfield!

OPPORTUNITY FOR LEADERSHIP
It seemed that we are back to the old days when it was par for the political course to “oppose, expose and depose.” But in an enlightened period of democracy, the methods must be fair, not foul. The local government elections must not be an occasion for war; it must be an opportunity for involvement and leadership.
When I went to Paradise on Friday for the Regional Agricultural and Commercial Exhibition, I looked around but did not see the PPP leaders who have been elected to the Mahaica-Berbice (Region Five) Regional Democratic Council. The regional chairman and the PPP regional councillors boycotted this important event that was intended to showcase the achievements of this great region.
With every good intention, Imran Sacoor, President of the Region Five Chamber of Commerce, whom I described as “a regional patriot”, while complimenting the Coalition Government for development works in the region, noted that much more could be achieved if funds were available to build farm-to-market roads and dams into cultivation areas. I responded that for 2018, monies allocated for capital works in the region amounted to $415M, but that the elected PPP leaders were not interested in promoting development that would make the Coalition Government look good.
In these local government polls, while the APNU+AFC Coalition remains in government, the election of elements who are committed solely to “oppose and depose” would be a betrayal of the ideals of our republic to invite, encourage and promote genuine, grassroots, participatory democracy.
I may be tempted to advise the opposition to come clean, play fair. But, as old people say, you cannot teach old dogs new tricks.