Dear Editor,
Dr Asquith Rose, in a recent letter to the editor, thought that the PNC could save itself from slowly expiring by changing the old guard and replacing them with youth. That prescription is only partly true. The successful solution lies in the following:
(1) The PNC must cease using race and racism as the main plank of mobilising support. That plank was successful 50 years ago, but the sociology of the country has changed over the half-a-century, and this leaves spokespersons like Dr David Hinds and Mr Vincent Alexander as anachronistic voices in the deep jungle. Race does not work anymore, since the young people of the country have long moved away from it. The other parties have recognised this, and if the PNC does not banish race and racism from its armory, it will inevitably die.
(2) The PNC must get rid of the deep mindset that the PPP is invincible. This false assumption has been with the party since its founding, despite the fact that political trends have shown the contrary, as the rise of Rodney and the 2015 Elections. This assumption has deep down demoralised the party and led it into rigging elections, and intellectuals like Dr David Hinds are articulately strengthening that assumption with, for instance, his flawed prescriptions as to how Guyana must run its politics. (If one studies the newspapers of the 1950s and early 1960s, one would find that Dr Hinds’s pronouncements could have been plucked from them.)
(3) The PNC, to survive in the modern world, has to be democratic in its internal elections and on the broad stage of Guyanese politics. This is extremely difficult, since the PNC has always gained from a lack of democracy by rigged elections, bullyism and violence. In 2020, however, it tried all three and failed disastrously, and the entire world and all Guyana, except the small cabal of riggers, are committed to upholding democracy. The PNC’s determination to fight democracy has brought the party to the door of extinction. In addressing this difficult issue of how to make the PNC democratic, the PNC should discreetly arrange a national think-tank, since the Hindses and Alexanders and those of their ilk are no longer useful.
(4) The PNC has always allowed itself to be enveloped in credulous self-delusion, with destructive result. I will give readers a few examples to drive home the point: When the no-confidence motion was carried, instead of having elections within the prescribed time when APNU/AFC would have won those elections, they decided on a delay of a year. Secondly, before the Elections, Prof Thomas glibly talked of the narco-state and 5 billion dollars of state property could be recovered. When Thomas was put to the test, there was no narco and he was unable to recover one cent of any of the alleged $5 billion of state property, though he was given 50 expensive audits to help him.
Worse, APNU/AFC spent two of its five years chasing after the chimera of state property when it should have been governing. And lastly, during the recount of votes at the last election, when PNC/APNU understood that it had irretrievably lost, it deluded itself that dead people or non-existent voters had voted, though the voting process was water-tight and it was, in any case, controlled by PNC/APNU supporters. And now it has decided to bring the same chimerical accusations before the courts. The PNC/APNU has to work out some way by which it could free itself from self-delusions.
Yours sincerely,
Paul Validum
Ramlochan
