GEORGETOWN, Guyana, CMC – The opposition Working Folks’s Alliance (WPA) Friday referred to as for the College of Guyana (UG) to be named after its founding member and tutorial, Dr Walter Rodney, who was assassinated right here 45 years in the past.
“The WPA places on the nationwide agenda the renaming of our nationwide college, the Walter Rodney College of Guyana. Whereas small steps, principally opportunistic, have been made to acknowledge his contributions, his identify isn’t affixed to a visual nationwide establishment,” the WPA mentioned in a press release.
It mentioned that renaming the UG in his honor and reminiscence is a most becoming recognition of the famend scholar and educator, who was killed in a bomb blast whereas seated in his car on June 13, 1980.
Proof later surfaced that his brother, Donald, had minutes earlier collected a walkie-talkie from then Guyana Defence Pressure (GDF) electronics professional Sergeant Gregory Smith, who left for French Guiana days after the bombing. Smith labored within the French nation beneath the assumed identify Cyril Johnson till his loss of life from most cancers in 2002.
Rodney was killed on the top of a civil riot to take away the then Forbes Burnham-led Folks’s Nationwide Congress (PNC) authorities “by any means crucial.”
The WPA and the PNC-Reform have since fashioned an lodging in coalitions in 2011, 2015, and 2025, regardless of the assassination.
“Though 4 and a half many years have handed since that fateful night time, the injuries are nonetheless contemporary within the psyche of those that lived by means of these occasions, particularly Rodney’s household and shut comrades,” the WPA mentioned.
It mentioned Rodney’s assassination “introduced Guyana and the Caribbean nose to nose with the contradictions of post-plantation societies, including, “Walter Rodney was a sufferer of the political degeneracy that accompanied makes an attempt at post-colonial nation-building.”
The WPA has entered right into a coalition with the PNCR for the September 1 elections, saying it “injects the Rodneyite imaginative and prescient of Nationwide Unity and Reconstruction or what’s immediately popularly referred to as coalition politics.
“Our unwavering advocacy and wrestle for a grand coalition to contest the upcoming election is greater than electoral technique—it’s deeply rooted in our historic drive for nationwide jointness. WPA will firmly plant the Walter Roney banner of Folks’s Energy/ No Dictator within the imminent marketing campaign,” that social gathering mentioned.
WPA mentioned it regards Rodney as a fighter, visionary, and apostle of individuals’s energy. It mentioned it recommits itself to the Rodeyite imaginative and prescient of a free and impartial Guyana premised on racial and sophistication equality and fairness.
“Walter Rodney confronted our class-race dilemma, not by denial however by energetic engagement at each the mental and activist ranges. He reached for a multiracial praxis with out denying his personal racial id.
“WPA holds quick to that praxis as we navigate the complicated terrain of the post-plantation petrostate.”
