The Working Folks’s Alliance (WPA) on Friday referred to as for the College of Guyana (UG) to be renamed after its founding member and famous tutorial Dr. Walter Rodney, who was assassinated 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, largely opportunistic, have been made to recognise his contributions, his identify is just not affixed to a visual nationwide establishment,” the celebration stated in a press release.
Rodney was killed in a bomb blast on June 13, 1980, throughout a interval of civil unrest aimed toward eradicating the then Forbes Burnham-led Folks’s Nationwide Congress (PNC) authorities. The WPA highlighted that proof later surfaced linking the assassination to members of the Guyana Defence Pressure.
“Though 4 and a half a long time have handed since that fateful evening, the injuries are nonetheless recent within the psyche of those that lived via these instances, particularly Rodney’s household and shut comrades,” the WPA stated, describing Rodney as a sufferer of the political turmoil accompanying post-colonial nation-building.
The WPA, now in coalition with the PNCR for the upcoming September 1 elections, stated the alliance “injects the Rodneyite imaginative and prescient of Nationwide Unity and Reconstruction or what’s in the present day popularly referred to as coalition politics.”
“Our unwavering advocacy and battle 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 Rodney banner of Folks’s Energy/No Dictator within the imminent marketing campaign,” the celebration acknowledged.
The WPA reaffirmed its dedication to Rodney’s imaginative and prescient of a free, unbiased Guyana based on racial and sophistication equality. “Walter Rodney confronted our class-race dilemma, not by denial however by lively engagement at each the mental and activist ranges. He reached for a multiracial praxis with out denying his personal racial identification,” the celebration stated, including, “WPA holds quick to that praxis as we navigate the complicated terrain of the post-plantation petrostate.”
