The AFC is facing its final curtain
Kaieteur News – Do not think for one thing that the many resignations, taking place in the Alliance for Change (AFC), are part of a natural attrition process! Do not think for a moment that these resignations will not affect the future of that party.
The AFC is imploding. These resignations deny the AFC of the critical second-level leadership, the very leadership that will have to take responsibility for the party’s future.
That is, the future of the party seems bleak. Its reserves are dwindling and those cadres that were supposed to be part of the AFC’s political succession will not be around by the time the next elections are due.
A political vacuum is created within the AFC. Additionally, unless the leadership arrests the current haemorrhage of its membership, the AFC will become a more bare-bones party than the Workers Alliance.
Those who resign have seen the writing on the wall. They know that the AFC will never see political power again, at least not after that disgraceful performance between March and August last year. Leavers know the truth: the AFC instead stood on principle tied to a dishonest plan to defy the results of the elections after initially getting its supporters to believe it had won the elections.
The senior leadership of the AFC has lost credibility. Moreover, they should be stepping aside and making room for the second tier leadership to take control. Instead, they are determined to stay on in the party and the National Assembly, despite the view that the AFC with them in place has become inexplicable.
Despite this, the recent flow of resignations is unlikely to have anything to do with frustration over succession in the AFC. No, the writing is clear: people want to move on with their lives and they know that the AFC has little chance of defeating the kind of political influence that it did in 2011. As such , people move on with their lives.
But this is not the full story. Do not believe for one second that the PPP / C covert hand is not part of some of the resignations. The PPP / C knows that once it breaks the AFC, nothing will stand in its way of staying in office for a long, long time.
As part of its election strategy, the PPP / C has long targeted the AFC. And now that the AFC has self-inflicted wounds, the PPP / C is going to deliver the coup de grâce.
The PPP / C knows that since 2006 it lost votes to the AFC and that the AFC was responsible for the PPP / C having a minority government in 2011. The PPP / C knows that in any head-on showdown. with the PNC / R, it will easily whip up that party. As such, he has set himself the task of diluting the AFC.
But it has also been the tradition of the PPP / C to go after parties, which threatens its support base. And in 2011, the AFC made serious in-roads into the PPP / C support base, largely because of ground work done by former Ravi Dev party members, ROAR, on behalf of the AFC.
The PPP / C clawed back that support in 2015. The AFC allowed itself to become the political pattern of the APNU and the people who voted for it were disgusted and refused to give them their votes in 2020.
A few nights ago, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, who is also the PPP’s Secretary General, appeared on the GLOBESPAN program with former head of the Democratic Labor Movement (DLM), Paul Nehru Tennassee. When Tennassee established his political party, the PPP / C, then under Cheddi Jagan, pursued him with rabies.
They had labeled his party as a CIA outfit and released their gifts on him and his political activists. Although the PNC was constantly rigging elections in those days, the PPP / C did not broker any cuts to its power base.
Ironically, in the run-up to the 192 elections, Jagan, as a compromise, eventually agreed to a proposal, which would see him as the President’s candidate with Tennassee and Clive Thomas as Vice Presidents. The GUARD Movement and WPA then vetoed that proposal.
So while much of what goes on in the AFC is done by itself, the PPP / C is also working behind the scenes to destroy the AFC. By the time the next elections arrive, the AFC will be to the APNU what the WPA is today, a purely political sign.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)