ON December 23, 2015, around 11:00hrs, my gate bell was pressed. I looked out and there was a Black SUV at the gate. I came out and the gentleman gave me a Christmas bag and told me Minister Amna Ally sent it for me. Inside was a bottle of Johnny Walker whiskey, a bunch of roses and a Christmas card. The card read: “Freddie, thank for you your bravery and patriotism.”

This is the third time I am writing about this occasion regarding Amna Ally. I hope there will be many more occasions that I can repeat this unusually positive attitude to me by a politician whose party I have denounced since I entered UG as a freshman in 1974.
I never got a mere or formal thank you from any politician from the AFC or PNC after the APNU+AFC won the election in May. There is a saying I heard from my mother when I was mere child. When people dismiss you as a nobody or too unimportant to even look at, then they would “pass you like exam.” Amna Ally unlike all other AFC and PNC leaders (except Ronald Bulkan and Aubrey Norton though in 2015, Norton was not a top tier PNC leader) never passed me like exam.

Amna Ally was an enduring figure of friendly temperament that cut across race, and party lines. Amna Ally was one of Guyanese politics most acceptable politicians. I don’t think since the fall of the Burnham government, someone like Amna Ally was appreciated in the PNC. Because after Burnham died, the PNC was incapable of reproducing the political culture of camaraderie that inhered inside the PPP and the PNC.
After the death of Burnham, Hoyte with his middle class aloofness (which finds expression in David Granger) did not fertilise the grassroots fields of the PNC. After the death of Burnham, I think the era of an Indian icon in the PNC died. Whatever you want to say about

Burnham, he was of a temperament that excluded the fear or bias or cultural thinking that an Indian being a powerful figure in the PNC, the way Roger Luncheon was a power in the PPP.
I think the difference between the PNC and the PPP since the death of Burnham and Jagan is that the Jaganite philosophical legacy is impossible to be dissolved in the PPP. Jagan was a quintessential philosophical politician whose mind was taken up with class, and thus he cultivated a multi-racial culture in the PPP through intense working-class activism.

So driven by ideology, Jagan locked away any thoughts of the PPP being for Indians only. He would have freely allowed for the rise of a school of African big wigs in the PPP. Clement Rohee and Roger Luncheon had far more power and authority in the PPP than 99 percent of the Indian hierarchy in the PPP.

I have to give Burnham credit, though he and Jagan arrived at their multi-racial mentality from different routes. The Burnham route was through strategic alliance with the Mulatto/Creole class and thus there was always a suspicion about the rise of a powerful Indian in the PNC. The only opening an Indian had of achieving real, solid, concrete power inside the PNC was through the man, Burnham, himself.
Amna Ally never became a Rohee or a Luncheon although she deserved that, but her time came late. Under Hoyte, Corbin and now, Norton, the Indian necessity in the PNC was/is not what it was under Burnham. Unfortunately, Amna suffered from the death of strategic thinking in the PNC with the passage of the Burnhamite PNC.

But even under Hoyte and Corbin, Amna Ally was an outstanding icon in the PNC because of who she was. She was a woman who saw beyond adversarial politics. She was friendly, inviting and inimitable with her humour. Amna was a gem in the PNC government under David Granger. She did not treat people arrogantly and she had no time to for the perception of who is PPP and who is PNC.
I have always been bitingly critical of the PNC all my life. From day one of the APNU+AFC government, I wrote a daily column critical of that government because my entrenched philosophical mind relentlessly whispered in my ear that this is not what they should do and what they promised to do.

But in the period of the APNU+AFC government, I could have talked to Amna about employment for people and there was not even an infinitesimal expression on her face that this was Freddie Kissoon who didn’t like the PNC. There will not be another Amna Ally in the PNC because another Amna Ally will not choose the PNC as their house.

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.