LAST week, the Alliance For Change (AFC) celebrated 19 years of existence. There was a function at its head office to mark the occasion, but what are the contents of those 19 years? A celebration of an organisation’s birth is naturally marked by its achievements and its contribution to the wider society to which it belongs.

There is no one in the field of the study of Guyanese politics that can add anything unwritten to date about the massive failure of the AFC that has not been printed before. Naturally, the reader may ask, what then is the purpose of this column?. I admit that is a valid question.
My reason for doing this analysis here is because people need to be reminded of their country’s history and the contours of that history. The AFC has gone in history just like the other major third party, the United Force, which formed the government with the PNC after the results of the 1964 general election.

Although I agree that there is the consensus in society that the AFC came and went, I think society needs to be reminded of those forces that came and why they died, and the cause of their demise, so we can always maintain a questioning mind about political actors such as those folks who formed the AFC.
In the coming year, with an election around the corner, I will be writing about the AFC, but there is still a useful purpose in analysing why it failed, even if that ground has been adequately covered by political observers and academics who study politics.
The observance of its 19 years of existence offers one another opportunity to look back on what was one of the glorious opportunities in politics to transform the totality of this nation that ended in ignominious disaster.

I don’t believe that even if there are more outpourings on the failure of the AFC as the years go by, that political theorists should close the chapter on the AFC. My deeply held belief is that the self-destruction of the AFC holds important lessons for understanding the nature of politicians.
For this reason then, I will not stop writing on the AFC. The lessons to be learnt from the AFC’s betrayal of this nation must always be presented to this generation and the next, so that these generations can avoid the dangerous minds that forever lurk around us promising The Promised Land.
I will not stop analysing the AFC’s evolution and its self-destruction because it is also the story of my psychological defects. Maybe a stronger term such as psychic weakness is preferable. People ask me all the time, why, given my political evolution at an early age, I came to be associated with a highly middle class, elitist group such as the AFC.

That is a long explanation that will literally full a book-length manuscript, but there are aspects of my association with the AFC that have made me a redeemable person, in other words, that have not dented the substance of my integrity. Here is an explanation of that redemption.
I was never a card-bearing member of the AFC. I never had a functional relation with the AFC. As an academic and a political analyst, I saw the AFC as a third party that opened up possibilities for changing Guyana’s political culture; thus, I used my columns in support of the AFC and I campaigned for the AFC during the 2011 and 2015 election contests

During all this time, I never had even a 15-minute dialogue with most of the big wigs in the AFC’s war room. For all my support for the AFC during that era, I never had even a fleeting conversation with Raphael Trotman, Cathy Hughes, Dominic Gaskin and others like them.
The de facto leader of the AFC in 2015 was a Jamaican consultant named Alstrom Stewart. He was a huge figure who wielded enormous influence in the AFC in 2015. I never saw Stewart much less spoke to him. I swear on my parents’ grave that even though I campaigned for the AFC, I never knew what Stewart looked like.

My time knocking around the AFC was always centred on its working-class cadres. Those were the people I gelled with and socialised with. Of course, I knew Moses Nagamootoo and Khemraj Ramjattan long before the idea of forming the AFC was even conceptualised.
But even though I had a large political profile in Guyana in 2015, I never spent any time at all socialising with the middle-class elites of the AFC. As soon as the AFC came to power and showed its true colour (no pun intended but why not) I became a daily critic of its power intoxication. For five years, a daily column would be around 17,000 pieces.

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.