GEORGETOWN, Guyana– The Working People’s Alliance (WPA) is marking the 42nd anniversary of the assassination of its co-leader, Dr. Walter Rodney, on Monday with a pledge to help create an organized national movement to resist “dictatorship” and create a new political order based on power-sharing.
“Such a movement should be multi-party, multi-racial, and multi-class. WPA is prepared to help build that movement. Our objective in this regard is not just the offending party. Still, most importantly against the offending political order,” the WPA said in a statement reflecting on the June 13, 1980, bomb blast that killed Rodney, a noted academic.
Rodney was killed after being supplied with a bomb in a walkie-talkie by then Guyana Defense Force (GDF) electronics expert Sergeant Gregory Smith, who fled to French Guiana until his death from cancer in 2002.
Last year, the PPP Civic-led administration amended Rodney’s death records to reflect that he was assassinated and that the 1988 inquest into Rodney’s death would be invalidated because it states that he died due to misadventure.
The WPA noted that during the period 1970 and early 1990, together with the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), they shared the common objective of removing the then Forbes Burnham-led People’s National Congress (PNC) government.
In what had been widely regarded as the first free and fair elections in 28 years, the PPP won the October 5, 1992, general election.
But the WPA, which had been a junior partner in the A Partnership for National Unity (APNU, a government that lost the 2020 general election, said while electoral democracy is an “essential ingredient” in building a democratic order, it warned that an anti-dictatorial movement similar to the Rodney period “must not simply exchange one party for the other as we did in 1992, but it must strive to erase the conditions under which dictatorship thrives.
“WPA is not surprised that since coming to office in 2020, the PPP has fast-tracked the government and State in the dictatorial direction. How it came to office in the wake of the disputed 2020 election and its agenda of domination coupled with its willingness to stretch the limits of the Majoritarian Winner-Takes-All system in the context of ethnic division, provide fertile grounds for dictatorship.
“The willingness of some of the Guyanese elites to succumb to the pressure of political expediency also played a pivotal role in clearing the way for the current dictatorial order,” the WPA said in the statement.
Since withdrawn from the APNU, the WPA said that the ultimate defense against foreign domination and domestic ethnic-racial domination must be through power-sharing and shared governance.
“We urge the leaders of the two major parties to find ways to prepare the country for this eventuality. For us in the WPA, power-sharing is not about one party sharing the power of the other party; it’s about all parties sharing the collective power of the people of Guyana,” the WPA said.
It reminded the population that Rodney was killed “by a Guyana government and State that had descended to the lowest depths of dictatorship and autocracy” and urged the people to reflect on whether Guyana has returned to the dictatorial government and State against which Rodney fought.
and then 