THE PPP’s 32nd Congress, due this weekend (May 3-5) is, arguably, the most significant since and between the deaths of Co-Leaders and Founders Cheddi and Janet Jagan, since ex-President Bharrat Jagdeo became General Secretary — and since 2020, when Guyana started developing and benefiting from its new oil wealth, under the current PPP/Civic administration.

The numbers speak for themselves: Over 3,000 delegates and observers, making it three times bigger than the last Congress — and biggest ever, by far.
It will feature the usual reviews, updates and previews on party organisational, political, administrative, tactical and strategic matters, but it’ll also be quite unusual, coming at a time when Guyana is riding high on the global stage, opening the year in the Presidency of the United Nations (UN) Security Council and as Chair of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) – and, most of all, in light of the global exposure of Venezuela’s revived claim to its large and rich Essequibo region.

Congresses largely address domestic matters, but the PPP’s have always had an internationalist element where regional (Caribbean and Latin American) and global matters are considered, in line with the party’s traditional approach to ensuring its policies are applicable to the time, including when to engage in alliances and when to distance itself from those always willing to trade principles for power.

Guyana’s domestic challenges today are not only from within, but also from without, resulting in its need to ensure the nation can defend and protect itself from any external incursion, at a time when its sovereignty has never been felt so threatened.

While ensuring the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) accesses the means to capably defend its Motherland with assistance from available sources near and far, the PPP, under leadership of its General Secretary and an Executive President with a government willing to effect meaningful change, also has to ensure the current administration defeats the ‘Dutch Curse’ being wished on Guyana at home and abroad.

The way critics who should be putting country first are talking, they (maybe) think Guyanese would relish a reputation of being forever seen as never ever being able to responsibly and sustainably manage their rich new resources.

As always, the facts and figures defy even such thoughts, but the words and deeds of denial extend to extraterritorial misrepresentation and indefensible partisan propulsion of acrimonious approaches to almost every issue involving state decisions affecting all parties’ supporters.

Like never before, the PPP/Civic alliance today has demonstrated how positive party policies upheld and advocated over decades can eventually influence state policies to yield the fruits the PPP has always demanded before Oil and Gas, from the early ages of Gold and Diamonds, Bauxite and Aluminum alongside Sugar and Rice, when the nation’s coffers could also have been much better handled by the forebears of those today crying foul and fowl.

The 3,000+ PPP delegates and observers will decide on everything — from energy policies to ongoing and new national development projects, future plans and long-term goals for Guyanese of all five ethnic brackets, to continuing to demonstrate measurable levels of seriousness about breaking the racial political divide in ways that expectedly worry those who’ve always largely benefitted from its lessening effect.

Results of the last mid-term local government elections and developments since then have shown an unprecedented consolidation of PPP support among Afro-Guyanese and wider popular support from its policies of taking new benefits to places and people across Guyana — including hundreds of Amerindian communities, still nursing old wounds of historical neglect — which naturally infuriates those only now realising that people don’t really care who talks loudest, until the time comes to ‘walk-the-talk’.

Some will instead ‘walk the plank’ off the Ship of State and others will climb the gangway with more and better experience at steering the Good Ship Guyana through calm and rough waters, with old and new maps adapted by Time and History.

With national concern about threats to sovereignty, partisan differences within and between parties are normally put on back burners to cool-off, to allow for more genuine united national responses, including establishing patriotic national coalitions, whether for Democracy or Defence.

But not so today, even where the PPP has demonstrated its ability and willingness to start bridging the race gap, more by leaps than binds.
In such situations, it’s also usually necessary for coalitions of the willing to establish mechanisms to ensure current gains continue between, after and beyond Regime Change.

But the PPP cannot be expected to bury its neck in sand and be rigid and unbending, unrealistic and inelastic, in pursuit of genuine ways and means to continue to serve for as long as it can also continue to reap the electoral goodies from Good Governance.

Between the deaths of the Jagans and the arrival of Jagdeo, those who wrote the books of tricks around the books of rules used often-violent, scorched-earth ground-war tactics to prevent Janet Jagan from rightfully succeeding her husband as the next-most-eligible candidate for President – and to stop the young Jagdeo from replacing her to start a new 21st Century Guyana under a post-Jagan PPP, with Donald Ramotar as General Secretary and the Civic’s everlasting support with vice-presidential candidates of worth.

The PPP’s challenges today are multifarious, multidimensional and mountainous, including the constant focus of an ever-peeping opposition blowing windbags badly but loudly and hoping Guyanese will blindly follow bands of naked pipers and never gain the testicular fortitude to ask the singers to get dressed and stop playing with their instruments.

The usual criticisms will precede and follow this weekend’s Congress, but that being so, it would also be very wise for the loudest critics at home and abroad to always consider the enormity of the tasks facing today’s leaders of Party and State, against the background of a constantly changing regional and global environment.

Criticism is a natural and normal process in progressive politics, but must always be addressed on the basis of realism, not wishes.
In that sense, the most-unrelenting critics should try to walk just a mile in the PPP’s shoes today.