From The Point

Thursday, August 23, 2001


  Good Morning Mr. President
Is The APRC A Party, A Movement Or What?


Mr. President, since the inception of the APRC, we seldom hear about the
activities of your party. We never heard of meetings convened by organs of
the party at ward, constituency, regional or national levels. Does the APRC
in fact have machinery? Save the holding of a full congress and a mini one
at Kanilai, people never heard of meetings of your leading organs (if they
exist). We never heard of the APRC's Executive Committee or Central
Committee or National Executive, for between congresses, a party's life must
go on. How do you politically educate your militants? How are they inducted
on the ideology of policy objectives of the party? For that is what parties
are all about..

An ideology, a project, a programme for society's upliftment is developed,
enriched through discussions, analysis at party level and later sold to the
people. It would seem that both your party and government are satisfied with
the utopian Vision 2020 as your mantra for development. As we told members
of the think tank that developed it, the Vision is just wishful thinking.
How can a development plan be developed without serious projections based on
scientific data? The objectives are vague and more importantly they do not
have determinants such as policies devised to attain certain goals in a
specific time frame. It is of course illusory to believe that a development
plan could span for a 20-year period at a go.

What is needed is to aim at Objective X and lay down the plan that would
enable its attainment. This implies recognising of each sectors' framework
of operation in terms of infrastructure, investment, projection comprising
dates and possible success and failure for future adjustments. As far as
Vision 2020 is concerned, all that is relied upon is mere guesswork centred
on possibilities without any regard to the laws of probabilities. Trade,
Tourism, Agriculture, Health, Industry etc. have had setbacks from the day
the vision was developed. This simply means that if the vision's objectives
were scientifically worked out in consonance with the parameters indicated
above, the rescheduling of the year 2020 should have been high on your
agenda long time ago. This is so true that since the predicament in the
trade, agriculture, health and tourism sectors, only Yankuba Touray talks
about the vision.

He seems to forget that many travel agencies have indicated that they were
suspending or reducing their activities for this coming season. But back to
your party, the APRC. The substitution of "councils of elders" and " action
groups"(former July 22nd Movement) to real party structures cannot make the
APRC a modern day party as it has no machinery. A very serious thing for a
ruling party which aspires to secure the confidence of the electorate. In
our last editorial, we said that your selection as the APRC candidate by
"council of elders" had no democratic basis as only the congress of your
party can do so.

Will your party's congress select you as its presidential candidate or would
you still rely on the "councils of elders" who claimed to have already
selected you during your meetings with them at State House? If the
nomination of the "councils of elders" prevails, then you have no party. It
is as simple as that. Parties have membership who take part in the decision
making processes of their party so that they feel that they belong. Of
course all of them cannot be at all meetings hence the sub-division in
various organs for various attributes to respect the notion of
representation. A party's membership elects at various levels
representatives to the leading organs to partake in their name in decision
making processes. Any party that ignores this is neither a natural party nor
a democratic one.
Good day Mr. President





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