The AFC, WPA, PNC and the coalition’s chances at the next election

By Dr. David Hinds
THE AFC has been in the news quite a bit this past week. The Stabroek News, which played an instrumental role in the birth of the party, has been asking probing questions about its role in the selection of the GECOM chair. The AFC, for its part, had long indicated that it was not consulted on the selection. It told the media that its leader was summoned by the president and informed of his decision.

The AFC leader then accompanied the president in his brief meeting with the opposition leader. Then this week, the Canadian chapter of the party leaked parts of an email indicating that the leader and chairman of the AFC had advised the president, during a cabinet break, that he could legally make a unilateral appointment.

So, what can be concluded from the above scenario? The leaked email has not changed anything. I think that the AFC is correct in its insistence that it was not consulted. The advice given to the President was informally done and cannot be classified as consultation. But, it is clear that the AFC’s top leadership has had a position on the matter that was circulated to selected members. What is not clear is whether the party’s leadership organs gave their stamp of approval to this position.

If the party’s Canadian chapter’s stance on the matter is anything to go by, there is divided opinion within the ranks. This should not be surprising, for the AFC was birthed as a strenuously anti-establishment party with a very strong anti-PNC bias. The problem with Guyanese politics is that its bi-polarity forces third-parties, from the UF to WPA to AFC, to enter into alliances with one or the other big party, if they are to become part of the formal governance structure. If the AFC and the WPA were to dogmatically hold on to their original positions of non-cooperation with the big parties, they would be permanently sidelined from government.

The challenge for these third parties is, having become part of the government, how do they collectively govern while maintaining their fidelity to their original charter. And it seems to me that neither the AFC nor the WPA has satisfactorily worked out that dilemma. Their job is made much more difficult partly by the PPP’s tenacity as an opposition which leaves little space for self-critique and critical dissent within the government ranks.

And partly, by a persistent, ingrained praxis of important sections of the PNC’s leadership that measures the coalition’s success in terms of the potential votes that each party brings.
There would be no coalition government without the PNC, but the PNC would not be in government today without the AFC and the WPA. The WPA’s role within the APNU was critical in that group’s breakthrough in 2011.

There are sections of the African-Guyanese middle class, which bolted from the Burnhamite PNC in the 1970s, returned when Hoyte moved away from Burnhamism, left when Corbin took over the reins and returned when the APNU was formed. The Indian-Guyanese rebels who moved to the Ramjattan-Nagamootoo (not Trotman’s) AFC in 2011 would have never touched the PNC as PNC—they reluctantly embraced the coalition because of the APNU, not the PNC.

The survival of the coalition, therefore, depends a lot on the ability of the WPA and the AFC to prove that their presence in the government amounts to policy content and directions consistent with their orientations. In other words, the coalition’s policy agenda must reflect, to some extent, policies that are associated with those parties. Second, they must be able to temper the inevitable PNC penchant for domination and marginalisation of partners. In the absence of those two things, the coalition which brought the government to power would collapse.