LAST week, the Alliance for Change (AFC) celebrated its 19th anniversary. There was a reception at the head office to mark the occasion, but what is the content of these 19 years? The celebration of the birth of an organization is naturally marked by its achievements and its contribution to the larger society to which it belongs.

No one in the field of the study of Guyanese politics can add anything unwritten to date about the massive failure of the AFC that has not been previously published. Naturally, the reader may wonder, what then is the purpose of this column? I admit that this is a valid question.
The reason I’m doing this analysis here is because people need to remember the history of their country and the contours of that history. The AFC made history alongside the other major third party, the United Force, which formed the government with the PNC after the results of the 1964 general elections.

Although I agree that there is a consensus in society that the AFC came and went, I think society needs to remember those forces that came and why they died, as well as the cause of their disappearance, so that we can always keep a questioning mind about political actors such as those who formed the AFC.
Next year, as the elections approach, I will write about the AFC, but it is still useful to analyze the reasons for its failure, although this subject has been sufficiently covered by political observers and academics who study politics.
The celebration of its 19 years of existence provides a new opportunity to look back on what was one of the glorious political opportunities to transform this entire nation that ended in ignominious disaster.

I don’t believe that even as we become more upset about the failure of the AFC over the years, political theorists should close the chapter on the AFC. My deep conviction is that the self-destruction of the AFC holds important lessons for understanding the nature of politicians.
This is why I won’t stop writing about the AFC. The lessons to be learned from the AFC’s betrayal of this nation must always be presented to this generation and the next, so that these generations can avoid the dangerous spirits that still lurk around us promising the Promised Land.
I will never stop analyzing the evolution of AFC and its self-destruction because it is also the story of my psychological defects. Perhaps a stronger term, such as psychic weakness, would be better. People ask me all the time why, given my political development from a young age, I came to be associated with a highly bourgeois elitist group like the AFC.

It’s a long explanation that would literally fill a book-length manuscript, but there are aspects of my association with the AFC that have made me a redeemable person, in other words, one who doesn’t have not damaged the substance of my integrity. Here is an explanation of this redemption.
I was never a member of the AFC. I never had a functional relationship with the AFC. As an academic and political analyst, I saw the AFC as a third party that opened up possibilities for change in Guyana’s political culture; thus, I used my columns in support of the AFC and campaigned for the AFC in the 2011 and 2015 elections.

During all this time, I never had even a quarter of an hour of dialogue with most of the bigwigs in the AFC situation room. For all my support of the AFC at that time, I never had even a passing conversation with Raphael Trotman, Cathy Hughes, Dominic Gaskin and others like them.
The de facto leader of the AFC in 2015 was a Jamaican consultant named Alstrom Stewart. He was a huge figure who wielded enormous influence within the AFC in 2015. I have never seen Stewart let alone spoken to him. I swear on my parents’ graves that even though I campaigned for the AFC, I never knew what Stewart looked like.

My time working at the AFC has always been focused on its worker executives. These are the people I became familiar with and socialized with. Of course, I knew Moses Nagamootoo and Khemraj Ramjattan long before the idea of ​​forming the AFC was even conceptualized.
But even though I had a significant political profile in Guyana in 2015, I never spent any time socializing with the bourgeois elites of the AFC. As soon as the AFC came to power and showed its true colors (no pun intended but why not), I became a daily critic of its intoxication with power. For five years, a daily chronicle would contain around 17,000 items.

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