Ramotar says it is too early to reflect

OCTOBER 22, 2015 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER FEATURES / COLUMNISTS, FREDDIE KISSOON

As I entered the door of my home on Tuesday around 8.25 pm, the television was on and Donald Ramotar was on the screen. He was being interviewed by the HGPTV newscast. The question I heard was, what regrets he has about things not done and things done but didn’t work out. For a President who spent three years in office, his answer was unusual. He said it is too early to reflect on his Presidency. With three years behind him, Ramotar must have at least a few items in his head of which when he looks back there must be regrets. The most naked one was his failure to either court the AFC or APNU after the 2011 elections to prevent the no-confidence vote. Minority governments are inherently shaky for commonsensical reason – you can wake up and find yourself out of power because you don’t have a majority in Parliament. Mr. Ramotar was not prepared to distribute any kind of power to either of the two parties, no matter how small. It was the most fatal mistake of the Ramotar presidency thus, he will end his political career without a legacy. Several reasons explain why Mr. Ramotar showed such unwise obduracy. For many analysts, including this columnist, an overarching factor was the relentless presence of Mr. Jagdeo in the presidency of Ramotar. It would appear that Mr. Jagdeo’s style of politics, minority government or not, was never to seek any modus vivendi. But even if Jagdeo had left it up to Ramotar, there would have been no concessionary attitude. Herein lies the tragedy of the PPP which will further undo it in the 2020 elections. The PPP is soaked in the mythology that it cannot lose national elections. For the PPP, it never did, it never will. That is partially true. If the 1968, 1973, 1980 and 1985 elections were physically clean, the PPP would have won. Any party looking at that type of invincibility would conclude it has a permanent electoral imprimatur. The PPP believed this and put down the loss of a majority in 2011 to over-zealous Berbicians who stayed away out of the belief that the victory was a done deal. The perpetual triumphalism came from the racial arithmetic. In a poisonously plural society, race makes PPP victory a foregone conclusion. From 2000 onwards that arithmetic began to change but the optical illusion remained stationary. Indians were leaving Guyana faster than the bullet train in Japan. But the historical mythology prevented the PPP from seeing and interpreting changing demography. The thinking of the PPP is that once you combine the Indian and Amerindian electorates, the PPP is unbeatable. The huge signpost that was there to see from 2000 that Indian numbers had declined, that the Indian voter was no longer a Pavlovian creature, and that African Guyanese were less apathetic in voting, was ignored by the monarchs of Freedom House We arrive now at a critical juncture – why did the PPP lose the 2011 and 2015 elections? We will not dignity the asinine claim of rigged polling in 2015. Of the Indian numbers, the PPP cannot get a hundred percent. To have won the 2011 poll it had to collect a hundred percent of Indian and Amerindian votes. That was impossible in 2011. Interestingly, the Indian votes for the PPP rose dramatically in 2015 and this is the reason why the PPP still cannot believe it lost. The PPP believes it has got back the embrace Indians gave the AFC in 2011. This is extremely faulty analysis. The PPP did not recollect the ballots the Indians gave the AFC in 2011. It recollected a sizeable percentage of those 2011 ballots in the May 2015 election. But it was that small percentage that stuck with the AFC that prevented the PPP from going over the fifty percent mark. What is interesting to note is that though APNU analysts have argued that the AFC did not bring the eleven percent of the Indian votes in 2015 as most people expected, the percent that it did bring caused the PPP to lose. It means that the AFC was the crucial factor in the election victory. In all seriousness, I think the APNU leadership should acknowledge that if it wasn’t for the vivid symbolism of the APNU+ AFC unity team, the three- way race of 2011 repeated in 2015 would have resulted in another PPP minority government. Honestly! The PNC (not APNU) should be grateful to the AFC. Based on this analysis above, I think it is impossible for the PPP to win the 2020 poll. It cannot get all the Indian and Amerindian votes to take it over the 50 percent mark.