LAST Saturday at the Georgetown Club, A New and United Guyana (ANUG) held its congress and bombshells were thrown in the room that Camp Street motorists thought that an inferno was on and a crazy traffic jam ensued.
A number of executives who belonged to the Mullatto/Creole class (MCC) suddenly declined nomination for any conceivable position in the structure of ANUG. Timothy Jonas, founding member; Mrs. Jonas, founding member and Kian Jabour, founding member, declined nomination for any position whatsoever. During the congress, Jonas held the position of general secretary (GS) and Jabour was chairman.

Surely, one can’t be that naïve to think that the chairman and GS would not even accept a position on the executive. As it stands, both men are not in any decision-making forum of ANUG. It was a coup d’état because without the big names of Jonas and Jabour and the extensive activism of Mrs Jonas, ANUG will not have the traction that it had under them.

You have to be self-deceiving to think that Messrs Jonas and Jabour just exited the functionalism of ANUG without controversy, when two months ago on separate interviews on the Freddie Kissoon Show, both Jonas and Jabour proclaimed that they are expecting a good showing in the next general election with at least four seats expected.

Why Jonas, Mrs Jonas and Mr Jabour chose to leave the decision-making platform of ANUG is an issue I cannot elongate on because I do not want a libel suit. If Mr Jonas and Mr Jabour will be kind enough to guarantee me that I can discuss the internal wrangling of ANUG using courteous and respectful language as part of political debate, I will offer my analysis of why they declined nominations.

For now, I will resort to class analysis to explain the failure of ANUG after Saturday’s debacle. Before I proceed, a diversion is in order. I withdrew my attention in the politics of ANUG after what its then chairman Jabour said about the banking system on the Freddie Kissoon Show two months ago.
I asked Mr Jabour to denounce what the banks were doing to working-class people. He was very brief, uttering something in defence of the banks that momentarily numbed me. I thought ANUG cared about the poorer classes. I know its founding star, Ralph Ramkarran has a large appreciation for socialist economics.

Let’s return to class analysis. The MCC are people who will greet you with intestinal smiles (they never smile broadly) that always have an inviting touch. But they also greet you with silicone elitism. I know this class. And I have happened to have the huge generosity of Lady Luck of possessing a sound academic education to write class analysis of the sociological world of the MCC in Guyana.

I interfaced with the MCC when I was perhaps the only working-class boy in an ocean of MCC students in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Guyana in 1974. Those people can be cruel in their proclivity to snob people they consider inferior humans. I interfaced with them in the Working People’s Alliance and I saw the inherent elitism that was barefacedly put on display.

I interfaced with them in the Alliance For Change and I kept my distance. Anyone who knew me when I campaigned for the AFC would know I hardly spoke a word to the MCC leadership in the AFC except David Patterson and Khemraj Ramjattan. Patterson showed his Mulatto/Creole mentality when after he secured political power, all I got from him was an ephemeral hello accompanied by an intestinal smile.

When ANUG was born, its intention was to succeed the AFC. The MCC imprint was all over it. It was a foregone conclusion that it would not get the votes of the proletariat and the peasantry. Then an implosion occurred. One of the MCC leaders, Jonathan Yearwood, was taken for granted. Yearwood was perceived to be part of the MCC world, but Yearwood is not your typical MCC elite.

He is quite a down-to-earth Mulatto/Creole gentleman that is not into class snobbery. Yearwood quit ANUG, citing double standards. Then he drifted strangely to another MCC outfit, a civil society group named Article 13. I have heard about his frustration with the leadership of Article 13.
The behaviour of the MCC in the WPA, AFC, Article 13 and ANUG is typical of that class. It is a class with embedded elitism that is psychologically incapable of transcending the barriers of race, class and colour and accept people for the qualities they have. I feel sorry for the new faces of ANUG after what the MCC did to them, but what were they doing in the first place with an MCC political party?

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.