AT an AFC press conference, Mrs Cathy Hughes in response to a journalist’s question on the role of the AFC in the five-month election disaster (it was not a fiasco or debacle; it was a horror show) of 2020, chose not to answer the question and advised the reporter that the AFC prefers not to dwell on the past but concentrate on the present time.

The reason for her reaction is simple: if you omit the past and discuss the current period in Guyana, then you are talking only about the ruling party, since that party is in power. If you entertain debates about the past, the AFC’s credibility will not survive. So, Mrs Hughes sought refuge in this moment of time. But it is unfair to the PPP, the citizenry, political polemics and Guyana’s intellectual climate to refuse to look at the past.

If a 25-year-old university graduate who just entered politics had taken the route Mrs Hughes took then, it would have been both logical and understandable. That graduate could say that he/she is brand new to politics, wasn’t part of the political landscape back then and feels comfortable discussing the present time. Mrs Hughes does not have that luxury.

She has been in politics for 13 years now, sitting for those 13 years as a parliamentarian and those 13 years as a senior Cabinet minister. By what reasoning one should not discuss Mrs Hughes’s past exercise of power? The past is a priceless guide to the future. Knowledge of past events helps us to understand the world we are living in and it empowers us to try to shape the future.

More importantly, the past character and present personality of the individual are intricately linked and cannot be separated. Who we are when we achieve adulthood came about by the way we handled our Freudian instincts in our early evolution.

If we delink the past from the present, we will never understand ourselves, other people and human nature, although Sigmund Freud said he had a problem defining the term, human nature and didn’t think it could be adequately defined.

I don’t think there is any greater case study in Guyana of the Freudian instincts of the past dictating the present than Eusi Kwayana. If Mrs Hughes studies Freud and applies him to Kwayana, she will see how important it is to know about the past of politicians who we vote to rule us.

Freud argues there are some congenital instincts (instincts we are born with) that do not gel with reality. So we use different mechanisms to make sure those instincts do not leave the ID where they naturally belong. The EGO and SUPEREGO act as a buffer against the ID. So the EGO manages the inherent unstable instincts in the ID through two important mechanisms – sublimation and repression.

I believe Kwayana repressed and sublimated his angry Afro-centricity through anti-Burnham activism. Once Burnham and his protégés were off the scene the Freudian Afro-centricity escaped from the ID and took refuge in Kwayana’s consciousness and the manifestation was the March 2020 elections.

Kwayana saw the March 2020 election as an episode of African bewilderment and African survival needs. Since the Freudian instincts were now openly directing him, Kwayana could only see the election in ethnic terms. For him, the defeat of Granger, Clive Thomas and other Afro-centred politicians was the coming of the relegation of African Guyanese once more, a fear that tormented his psyche in the 1960s, thus his exclamation that Guyana should consider partition.

The identical Freudian instinct that led Kwayana to refuse to condemn the election-rigging was expressed in one of the top hierarchical leaders in the AFC in July 2020. That person openly said in a virtual meeting with the executives of the AFC that given what was taking place with the election and Africans might be out of power, it is best that Guyana have an ethnic partition.

I apologise to my readers for the Kwayana and Freud diversion but I believe it is relevant to weaken the perspective of Cathy Hughes that we should talk about the present and not the past. This is not only a philosophically empty statement but one that seeks to deny Guyanese voters their entitlement to know about the Freudian past of the people who want to rule them.

The saying that the past is the guide to the future is one that is accepted by most humans in this world. Maybe we should not care about the expressions of the Freudian ghosts of the ordinary man because they can’t harm us.
We should be on a perpetual watch for those who have dangerous instincts in their IDs and those instincts once escaped and harmed us. I am referring to certain politicians who should never rule Guyana after March 2020.

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.