For a number of weeks now, Professor Clive Thomas’ weekly column in the Stabroek News has not appeared. I hope Dr. Thomas has not called it “George” because if he did, then his absence will leave a big chasm in Guyana’s historiography.
I found it both comical and repellant that Nigel Westmaas could opine that the profoundest thinker Guyana has produced is Martin Carter. That is certainly insulting to the mountainous work Thomas has produced over a 50-year period on Guyana’s political economy.

Since 2020, Guyana has not heard from Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine, a far more productive and learned thinker than Carter.
If any two persons can give an enthralling analysis with profound reflections on why the APNU+AFC government of 2015 failed and thus lost the 2020 general election, it is Thomas and Roopnaraine. It appears that Dr. Roopnaraine is not in the best of health. No matter if you dislike his politics, you have to concede that he has a top-rate analytical mind that can simplify the complexities of the APNU+AFC failure in office.

I was nonplussed that each week since 2020 Thomas would do a weekly column and there would be not one word from Thomas on his time in power when he held two sensitive portfolios – Chairman of Guyana Sugar Corporation and CEO of the State Agency Assets Recovery Agency. But more importantly, his role and that of Roopnaraine in power, power that evaded them since the 1970s and that they eventually acquired in 2015.
I don’t care what experience and writing capacity Khemraj Ramjattan, Raphael Trotman and Moses Nagamootoo have, they will not reach the intellectual height in an explanation of why the APNU and AFC faltered in government more than Thomas and Roopnaraine.
It will make for fantastic reading to digest what Thomas’ take is on the failure of APNU in office. One is just impatient to read Thomas’ thinking on the relation on the one hand between the WPA and AFC when in government and on the other hand, the WPA and the PNC.
One sincerely hopes that Thomas has not stopped writing and we will see some thoughts from him as to what went wrong from 2015 to 2020 and why the ship sunk. There is slim hope, but hope nevertheless that he will write on that dimension of modern Guyana.
I say “slim” because there seems to be a deliberate attitude on Thomas’ part to avoid discussing the APNU+AFC in government. Since 2022, he has been appearing on a podcast organised by David Hinds named Politics 101, but in dozens of discussions, there is not even one sentence on anything about the APNU+AFC time in power.

Here are some of the questions I have for Thomas. For someone who lived in Jamaica and grounded with the Rastafari adherents and knew how close Rodney was to the kingdom of Caribbean Rastafari, why did he and Roopnaraine allow the amendment to the marijuana law to lapse?
Prior to the acquisition of power, I can think of only five persons in the leadership of the WPA and AFC that would eagerly have argued for the amendment – Thomas, Roopnaraine and Ogunseye in the WPA and Nigel Hughes and Michael Carrington in the AFC. I don’t think I could point to anyone in the PNC leadership that would have supported the legislation.

My second curiosity is why Thomas as CEO of SARA ignored the suggestion of his deputy, Aubrey Retemyer, to renovate part of the doctors’ quarters on Quamina Street and Waterloo Street to house SARA rather to pay $2 million monthly to one of the richest Indian families in the Caribbean.
This was the same Thomas that while he ignored Retemyer’s proposal, went to Buxton, gave a talk on cash grants and named his talk, the “Buxton Proposal,” obviously preying on the feelings of Afro Guyanese.
Total amount that went to that family during Thomas’ reign at SARA until ANPU lost power in August 2020 was $120 million for four years, seven months. And maybe the family collected a few millions more when the PPP Government closed SARA because the family probably signed an agreement for compensation in event of contract termination.
My third question is what Thomas’ movement in the Guyana Government was like when he saw that the sugar workers who were retrenched because of estate closure and had to go to court to collect severance pay and were disallowed from fishing on the closed estates, an order that would have had to come from GuySuCo and Thomas was Chairman of the board. One is desperately hoping Thomas fills these gaping holes in Guyana’s historiography.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.