WHEN you consider the abject, pathetic, colossal nonsense the PNC, WPA and AFC did when they held power for five years, it may be scientifically impossible (although human behaviour is not subject to scientific determinism) for any of those parties to have a plausible showing in the next two general elections (2025 and 2030).
In Guyana, once a political party is born, one question is automatically asked: How multi-racial is the organisation. That question is always asked and, given ethnic realism in Guyana, will always be uttered by all Guyanese. No third party in the 2020 election was purely of one ethnic make-up.
For this reason, David Granger should be made to answer for a suicidal campaign strategy he adopted for the March 2020 election. Mr. Granger brought in a consultant group which was a White British outfit. The head of the group addressed a meeting of the top brass PNC, WPA and AFC at State House. Dominic Gaskin told me that the consultants did not meet with the AFC alone, and he described the work of the consultants as mambo jumbo.
The White British electoral expert (the man probably never heard of Guyana, prior to Granger inviting him to Guyana) in his address, suggested to the PNC, WPA and AFC leadership who were at the State House affair, that the strategy for the election should be total emphasis on Granger, the leader. The policy was adopted to use Granger’s image on all billboards and no faces from the AFC.
It was an atrociously asinine direction because in Guyana, the emphasis must be the two contenders- the Indian and the African. No party can garner substantial votes if that party does not focus on multi-racial faces. The AFC was there when the British consultants birthed their silly strategy. Not having learnt from Granger’s mistake, the AFC is seeking power on an Afro-centred platform.
No Indian or Portuguese is in the top four positions of the AFC. All are African Guyanese. It was sad, perhaps tragic, that the AFC leadership had a meeting with State Department officials and there was no Indian from Guyana in the delegation.
One Indian was in the photo and he is a man who left Guyana more than 50 years ago and absolutely no one in Guyana has ever heard about him. That the AFC could humiliate itself so foolishly is a large indication that it will suffer ignominiously at the election next year.
Is the leadership of the AFC competent to do political analysis? In 2005 when it was born, the AFC’s physiology was driven by multi-racial saturation. The Indian faces consisted of high profile Indians – Khemraj Ramjattan; Moses Nagamootoo; Rajendra Bissessar; Gerhard Ramsaroop; Charrandas Persaud; Geeta Chandan; Sasenarine Singh; Dr. Tarron Kemraj; Dr. Ramayya; attorney, Raj Poonai, Imran Khan and others too numerous to mention.
After 2005, the diaspora groups of the AFC in London, Toronto, New York, and Trinidad were headed by an Indian respectively. The 2011 campaign was financed by rich Indian businessmen both in and out of Guyana. These were people who once belonged to the party of Ravi Dev named ROAR. It will be no exaggeration to say that in 2011, the multi-racial label of the AFC was known throughout Guyana.
If the leadership of the AFC has any intellectual capability to do research, then it will know there are documents in GECOM that are available to them so they can see the voting patterns for all the districts in Guyana. From those documents, the AFC can see in which African, Amerindian, and Indian villages it got it votes from.
Those GECOM documents will reveal that the AFC did well in areas where Indians resided. We do not know where the AFC collected its votes from for the 2015 election because it went into contest as APNU+AFC. But logical deduction can tell you that there was still a support for the AFC from Indian people.
It is an amazing transformation that after its congress this year, no Indian is in the top four positions. Now there is some confusion here. Most, if not all of the small parties that participated in the 2020 poll had multi-racial leadership. If the leader was African, his second-in-charge was Indian and vice versa.
It dents the credibility of the current AFC leadership that it could not find a high profile Indian to be number two or number three when in fact those smaller parties in the 2020 election had well known African and Indian faces. The photo of the AFC delegation meeting State Department officials with no Indian who is a member of its top brass in the delegation, is something the AFC should not have made public because it was a suicidal image.

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.