THIS is yet another article in my ongoing series on the political evolution of the Mulatto/Creole class which started in May, shortly after I became a Guyana Chronicle columnist. My last installment was the analysis titled, “Raphael, this is Nassau,” of July 11, 2023.

In that piece, I took the analysis up to 2011 when the MCC insisted that Raphael Trotman be the presidential candidate for the Alliance For Change (AFC) second time after the 2006 general poll rather than rotate with Khemraj Ramjattan.

Space would not allow for a repetition of the main points in the July 11 article. So we continue from the July 11 article.
A huge fight broke out between Trotman and Ramjattan over the 2011 presidential candidacy but, by 2011, the AFC was no longer a pure MCC entity. As I argued in my July 11 analysis, Ramjattan had brought into the AFC a huge number of Indians, many of whom were closely aligned with the party Ravi Dev founded named ROAR.

Some of them were wealthy people who began pouring money into the AFC. The MCC couldn’t stop this because the MCC personalities who were behind the formation of AFC didn’t have the kind of resources that a large party like the AFC needed even though the party was formed in Mr. Christopher Ram’s office with the support of a very wealthy business family.
When the fight between Trotman and Ramjattan broke out, the MCC faced a nightmare. The AFC was to be the resurrection of the National Democratic Party, the child of the League of Coloured People, but in 2011, a substantial amount of Hindus and Muslims and dark-skinned Indians were in the midst of the AFC.

For example, at the time of his ascent in the AFC, Ramjattan was the chairperson of Gandhi Youth Organization (GYO). He celebrated his birthday in 2014 in Hindu rites at the GYO and none of the top MCC personalities came except two.

As the fight grew larger for the 2011 presidential slot, a big battle broke out between Trotman and former ROAR member Dr. Somar from the Indian diaspora. You have to read the exchange which I have in front of me and which I kept in my email all these years. You read the exchange and you see graphically in front your eyes, Indians felt that they will not give up their place in politics.

Trotman lost out to Ramjattan in 2011 and from thereon, the MCC personalities who helped formed the AFC but were not inside the MCC, drifted away from the organisation they helped to birth.

By the time of the 2015 election, the MCC was more into assisting David Granger rather than the AFC. In the 2015 campaign, Trotman was based exclusively at the PNC campaign office in Queenstown.

All Guyanese in and out of the country by now know from Raphael Trotman’s March 2023 book that the AFC did not appoint him and two other MCC founders of the AFC as ministers after the 2015 victory. For more on this, see my column of Saturday, July 29, 2023 “Trotman and Ramjattan: What is truth?”

The MCC’s crossover to David Granger was concretised when in Bartica at the local government election in 2016, Trotman delivered an ocean of panegyrics of Granger in which he mentioned the “Nassau covenant” he and Granger had in the Bahamas about the need for the PNC to reach out to the MCC.

In the form of Granger, the PNC did reach out to the MCC and with the alienation of the MCC from the AFC, the MCC had found a resting place.
The story of the APNU+AFC government of 2015-2020 was the tale of a battle between the MCC and the now Indianised AFC.

This war began from the very time the APNU+AFC regime was born. The lowest point in the strained relation came in February 2019 at the Georgetown Club after the AFC concluded one of its statutory executive meetings.

In an interview with the Guyana Times, Trotman said that he does not believe for the 2020 general elections, the Prime Ministerial candidate should rotate between Moses Nagamootoo and Ramjattan.

In that interview with the Guyana Times, Trotman brought his Freudian notebook to the surface. And he was simply echoing what the MCC inside the PNC thought.
One would believe that David Granger and Raphael Trotman during their Nassau rendezvous never could have imagined not only an Indian leadership in the AFC but a Hindu leader at that.

This was at the centre of the internecine quarrel between the PNC and the AFC inside the new government from 2015-2020. Next- the MCC versus the Indians inside the corridors of power – 2015 to 2020.