WITH the exception of Nigel Hughes who was in constant disagreement with how the AFC was handling power after 2015, the elected leadership of the AFC at its congress, last Saturday, is the same people that destroyed their own party after they used power for themselves and not for the good of Guyana.

The same people that have become political pariahs after their self-destruction between 2015 and 2020 will be the same people headlining the AFC in the 2025 election. There is a traditional saying for such an occurrence – old wine in new bottle. So, David Patterson who told me on the Freddie Kissoon Show that he was giving way to the younger generation has decided to stay.
He is now the Chairman who is deputy leader. Raphael Trotman is now General-Secretary. Cathy Hughes and Khemraj Ramjattan are in the executive. What are these people hoping to achieve in politics and in electoral politics? Their attitude is straight out of the Tennessee Williams playbook. Williams’ characters never wanted to belong to the past so their lives were lived in frightening and tragic delusions.

Most analysts, maybe all of them, including this columnist that assessed the AFC after the last general election felt that if it was going to survive then it had to do a complete make-over. Through an act of exigency, it had to change its leadership. But Saturday, the same faces will lead the AFC into the 2025 general elections.

Now that the congress is over, the mauling will begin. There is perhaps only one Indian face in the executive – Khemraj Ramjattan. The list of the executives has not been announced so there may be another Indian name but as I reported in my column yesterday (Tuesday), the four top office holders are all African Guyanese, thus the mauling of the AFC by its critics has already begun.
Why would the AFC not have at least one Indian in its upper leadership in a country where people are very sensitive about ethnicity? But more importantly how many Indians contested for the available slots. There was no Indian in the contest for leader, chairman and general-secretary.

Is this the AFC that people are going to vote for? As I wrote above, the critical outpouring may have already begun. One comment I saw in the press was about Trotman and the oil contract. I want to discuss Trotman’s position on the general elections of 2020. He said publicly that the Chief Election Officer (CEO), Mr. Keith Lowenfield, had the constitutional power to compile the votes and make a declaration which is not subject to a decision by any other person in Guyana.
This was comically wrong. The Chief Justice asserted that the CEO cannot be a lone ranger and he is subordinate to GECOM. It was GECOM that refused the CEO’s declaration and ordered him to use the official declaration of the CARICOM supervised recount figures (see my column in Kaieteur News of Thursday, July 23, 2020 titled “The Lone Ranger” starring Lo Lo and directed by Raphael Trotman.”

Is this the man people are going to vote for? I think Trotman is a liability to the AFC’s electoral chances. When the election campaign begins, we need to remind the electorate what Trotman said about the Caribbean islands during the election disaster of 2020. He asserted because of their smallness with constituencies of 400 and 500 people, they would not understand Guyana’s electoral system. For more on this see my article of Wednesday, July 15, 2020, titled, “The crass ignorance of Raphael Trotman.”
It is because of the poor leadership of people like Trotman, David Patterson, Khemraj Ramjattan, Moses Nagamootoo and Cathy Hughes that observers thought that the AFC after it lost power could only survive if it remolded itself. This was the pathway of the communist parties of Western Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. In France, Germany and other EU countries the communist parties in those places changed both their names and leadership.

When the election campaign begins whether the AFC is with the PNC or it contests on its own, it is going to get hammered by the PPP. No doubt the PPP will cite the 2001 dossier that the AFC commissioned and which had these words in it: “The Coalition lost the Presidential and Parliamentary polls after an almost six-month acrimonious National Recount, which ended with a ruling by the Caribbean Court of Justice, who intervened despite jurisdictional questions.”

There was no acrimonious national recount. The PNC and AFC made it acrimonious. And the use of the words “despite jurisdictional questions” points to the AFC seeing the CCJ as separate from Guyana’s court system. It is part of Guyana’s jurisdiction legal structure.
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.