NIGEL Hughes announced, on becoming leader of the AFC, that before the AFC could talk about coalition prospects, the AFC has to address the topic of what happened for it to have lost power in 2020. When Nigel made that expression, it became an instant curiosity in people’s mind. What will the analysis consist of?

Michael Carrington, newly-elected AFC vice-chairman, intoned on the Freddie Kissoon Show last week, that he believes the AFC should apologise to the nation for wrongs and mistakes made during its tenure in office. He offered an apology on his behalf, and said more such apologies are forthcoming.

The problem the “new” AFC has is that it is not new at all. It has post-2005 faces in its hierarchy that will not gel with the thinking of Hughes and Carrington. In fact, most people in and out of Guyana were surprised when the news broke that David Patterson was contesting the leadership. Patterson, with unambiguous words, said on the Freddie Kissoon Show that he was bowing out of politics, and he wants to give way to the younger generation.
Then Raphael Trotman surfaced and contested the post of General-Secretary. Cathy Hughes and Khemraj Ramjattan are in the executive; so are some older faces like Sherod Duncan. It did not take long for people to wait to see how the “new” AFC would perform, when David Patterson, the chairman, who, by the constitution of the AFC, is deputy leader, gave a disturbing answer to a reporter’s question.

When asked why so many cadres left the AFC, Patterson said they did so for economic reasons. This is a deliberate denial of facts that have now gone into Guyana’s history. Nigel Hughes and Michael Carrington will have their work cut out for them, because the old heads in the AFC will not emulate Dominic Gaskin and offer an objective analysis as to why the AFC failed when it had power.

Patterson was deceptive, and why? For the five years that the AFC was in power, I did a daily column. Count up those columns, and you are talking 1,500 columns. Spread over the five years of those 1,500 pieces are dozens and dozens of assessments of where the AFC was going wrong, and where it went wrong. I began my critical reviews of the AFC in power even before it took power.

Where did I get my research material from? I got it from the second-tier leaders, some of whom sat in both the management committee and the executive committee. There is no need to pen this column here, because, perhaps more than a hundred reflections on the betrayal of Guyana by the AFC between 2015 and 2020 are there for people to read, and all those analyses are in direct contradiction with what Patterson told the reporter.
I began my criticism of the AFC before it got into power after its “bigwigs” met at the AFC head office to select its ministers. A moment of political insanity descended on that room that has few parallels in Guyanese politics, from colonial times to the present. This weird incident in the life of the AFC I have written about more times than I can count since May 2015. I have raised it with several former AFC stalwarts on the Freddie Kissoon Show.

Once more, I am highlighting this Mephistophelean dance that the AFC did just one day before it entered government. This is a ghoulish departure in politics that you would never ever find in the PNC and PPP. Here we go once more. As the “bigwigs” sat down to give themselves ministerial portfolios, a few of them called a lady, who is a member of the Mulatto/Creole class, and offered her the post of Minister of the Environment.

This lady was not a member of the AFC, and did not campaign for them since the birth of the AFC. How did I come by this information? I was told this by more than eight second-tier leaders, three of whom were in the room, and watched as they were bypassed. I was having lunch at Le Excellence Restaurant on Charlotte Street with four of those second-tier leaders, whose emotional revulsion was uncontrollable.

When I arranged the interview on the Freddie Kissoon Show with David Patterson, he told me he will not attend, if I bring up that issue. I respected his wish and did not. All Guyanese in and out of the land awaits the AFC’s analysis of what went wrong while in power. But will the analysis be honest? No one should envy Nigel Hughes and Michael Carrington. Salvaging the AFC is simply impossible.

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.