LiveInGuyana

JOPP IN BOP

With a date for elections still yet to be announced, JOPP (the Joint Opposition Political Parties) may have already landed itself in political BOP. The wheels, it appears, are falling off the envisaged grand coalition seeking to remove the PPP/C from office. While Individual JOPP members have been busy exposing the skeletons in the ruling party’s closet – skeletons like crime, corruption, nepotism and personal enrichment of well-placed party functionaries – they would appear to be far less proficient less at holding together as a group.

Peter Ramsaroop has jumped ship! Not surprising, political watchers say. He has grown used to hopping from one political party to another. Having continually flaunted what he believes are his own eminent presidential qualities he has now decided that he wants no part of the PNCR which, he blurted out recently, “has never won an election in their life.”

Would-be President Ramsaroop is evidently playing to a gallery, seeking to provide the media with a measure of reportable sound bite though the obvious question that arises is whether he is only now discovering that the PNC has never won an election.

More curious, perhaps, is Mr. Ramsaroop’s pronouncement that his Party the Guyana People’s Partnership, having kissed the coalition talks goodbye, is saying that the door is still open. What are we to make of Mr. Ramsaroop’s outburst? As one fretful PNC/R supporter said after Mr. Ramsaroop’s parting of ways with the coalition, “Peter Ramsaroop and his party do not bring “squat” to a coalition. “They have no door to open or close.”

Pretty much the same would appear to apply to the remaining members of the JOPP – with the exception of the PNCR which is likely to be the backbone of any such coalition. Should the PNCR, therefore, have pitch-forked its presidential candidate, headfirst, it seems, into the coalition discourse? Some of the party’s members have already raised the question “what’s in it for us?”

Following Ramsaroop’s outburst GAP’s Everall Franklin appears to have scrambled swiftly in an effort to hold what is left of the wobbly coalition together, though, frankly, more than a few people would question his description of Ramsaroop’s pronouncement as a “most unwelcome development.” Why unwelcome? What exactly does Ramsaroop take with him? And is it not better that Mr. Ramsaroop stage what may well be his solo performance now and get that out of the way before we move deeper into the election season?