A meeting between Congressman Hakeem Jeffries and Trump’s son-in-law (talk about sleeping with the enemy!!) crossed your Eyewitness’ feed, and triggered questions as to what Hakeem had been up to the last few years!! After all, there was a time – not so very long ago – when we appeared to’ve snagged our very own US member of Congress!! Not literally, of course, since Hakeem has Crown Heights in Brooklyn to represent!!
But during the PNC-provoked post-2020 political convulsions, he seemed to’ve been remarkably well briefed about the happenings in a country 2600 miles away!! Evidently his (extremely!!) close association with Rickford Burke of the Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy had also ensnared him in Guyanese politics!! He even denounced what he described as American “interference” in Guyana’s elections!! A new Benedict Arnold??
By 2022, he was warning – from a Guyanese-American Opposition gathering – that Washington wouldn’t tolerate racism in Guyana!! His role as understudying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, plus his prominence in the Congressional Black Caucus, gave oomph to our opposition worthies’ – like the race-fixated Black Pudding man – narrative! Then came the curious part – the Congressman suddenly became rather less audible and visible!!
By September 2023, he was meeting President Irfaan Ali and other Guyanese officials in Washington!! More intriguingly, despite all the earlier sturm and drang about “discrimination”, the meeting produced no raising of the concerns that had previously dominated his Guyana interventions!! And thus began what might be called “The Great Jeffries Disappearance” – or the “Whatever happened to Jeffries?” mystery!!
There was no press conference announcing it, no congressional resolution declaring that the Congressman had finally discovered Brooklyn again, and no helicopter seen carrying him out of Guyanese politics!! To your Eyewitness here in Mudland, he simply became impossible to find!!
With Nancy having been sent out to pasture, was Hakeem preparing for pressing matters – such as the House Speakership – if the Democrats win the upcoming midterms?? Maybe his staff finally told him, “Congressman, Guyana has oil now, and they can afford their own political arguments!!” But the present silence contrast is rather amusing, innit?? Five or six years ago, Guyanese opposition politicians could summon a senior American politician who Pres Trump had called a “thug with a low IQ” and was the reason for dubbing Democrats “Dumocrats” – and now the sound of silence!!
That gotta have unsettled the Opposition!! After all, if THE Black American Congressman is willing to listen to both sides, what becomes of the so-called Opposition’s trump card of playing their race card!! The truth of the matter is Hakeem hasn’t disappeared at all – he’s looking at Pressie’s One Guyana!!
We’ve progressed to a point where a Black US leader has discovered there are actually two sides to our politics!!
…to Opposition Coalition??
To anyone with even a cursory acquaintance with our politics, the secret to the Opposition getting into office – without rigging, of course!! – was never a secret!! It could be summed up in one word – COALITION!! That’s right – and like The Sound of Music, we can start at the very beginning – here about politics, of course!!
After his PPP-Burnham was embarrassingly trounced by PPP-Jagan in the 1957 elections and as PNC by the PPP in 1961, Burnham was eased into power in 1964 by a coalition with D’Aguiar’s UF!! And having kicked out D’Aguiar, PNC had to rig all the way up to 1985!! And following a 23-year-old famine, it only returned in a coalition with the AFC in 2015!! And after Granger kicked the latter to the kerb, they’ve been out in the cold again!!
Your Eyewitness is writing this piece before any info about the Opposition’s Sanction Man-Norton meeting has been released.
If either of the two had any sense, they’d have discussed a coalition!!
…to the naysayers?
Your Eyewitness doesn’t want to jinx his Warriors or anything like that, but he gotta admit it’s hard not to sound smug when he notes their third straight win – three out of three!!
But he ain’t SPECULATING further!!
The post Whatever happened… to Hakeem? appeared first on Guyana Times.
