Dear Editor
HOW in God’s name Odinga, can Mark Phillips look after the interests of Afro-Guyanese? Obviously the political platform you stand on is not a national one, in that they need one man to address the interest of an entire complex and energetic national group. Any party or potential government needs to have its entire peoples interests in mind, not just a culmination of delegated worker-bees scouting honey for their personal interests. A man who has been ‘invisible’ in respect of having a vocal presence, no one knows him except former soldiers he served with, and not as we say, as a conscious African descendant. It is disrespectful that you should say this, knowing the history of the PPP from 1961 to 2010, under their stewardship of this land as colony and independent.

It does seem to me from the utterances at the opposition launch by Edghill, now you, that one of the tenets of acceptance into that political party is that you must seek to humiliate, denounce the rights and trivialise the potential of your origins, Sam Hinds and Luncheon were embarrassing experts at that. No none Afro-Guyanese human variation on the APNU+AFC side to my knowledge has ever conducted their vocabulary in that repugnant way. When did Afro-Guyanese need the PPP to chart their course? My grandfather came from Friendship, as you do; to buy villages, to brave the Pork-Knockers rapids, to construct drainage, develop institutions towards their betterment, farm lands and worked together to defy the plantocracy’s schemes to impoverish us, others have taken that mantle up, we know, we understand and know them. Mark Phillips is about Mark Phillips, so be it, he’s even beginning to sound like Sam Hinds. We already have our leaders; they have not abandoned or betrayed us. We have witnessed the broad-based government we asked for, it has enhanced and broadened our understanding of each other and positively reshaped Guyana. In any coalition, as in a brand new house, ‘Some kakaroach gon crawl in,’ but here you are on the altar of your fossilised cult insulting our resolve and intelligence, that you once defended, how are they to engage us, as they did with the blatant theft of ‘Farmer Nappy’s intellectual property?’ In our culture we have always been told, “Live yuh life suh when yuh stand befo yuh fathers, you can account to them.” Understand well, that the obsession with wealth and social relevance have caused many to abandon all of themselves.

Regards
Barrington Braithwaite