From SPPF to Parti PePe - What’s in a name?

So the SPUP / SPPF has a new name? Seychelles People's Party (Parti Lepep?)

As Shakespeare put it, call the Rose any other name, it would still remain a specific bunch of coloured petals with a scent, beauty and appeal that, in our minds, distinguish it from all others of the floral world!

It took 14 years to move from “People’s United Party” to “People’s Progressive Front” and 31 more years to dump that too-elusive unity and cohesive front and get down to just plain “People”. Clearly, the Reds seem to be in perpetual quest for a defining label, but are condemned to share the lot of the leopard who cannot change its spots!

The new “People’s Party” will be another name which will gradually fit into the local political landscape and vocabulary, if only by the sheer will and clout of its sponsors, the incumbent, Seychelles Government! But let there be no doubt about it. The 1964-1978 version of the party never achieved anything close to uniting the people. Its 1978-2009 did usher in what was, for the cold-war time, the politically correct, island-bred version of international socialism, but not in the scope of a national cohesive front that it sought. If anything, it only contributed to heightening the depth of the divisive politics that pit Seychellois one against the other.

With this history of the stubborn wolf trying on sheep’s clothing, one can be forgiven to see the People’s Party as only another freshly –cloaked entity travelling down the road of political dedication, muttering its self-taught mantras and hoping for that final, unencumbered, freely given and deserving political respectability!

The new name will not wipe away the party’s archives and memory of its leaders of the victimisation, corruption, cronyism, state-engineered violence, abuse of human rights and liberties, exile and unexplained disappearances and deaths of political opponents!

Had the new party only bothered to have a good bath before doffing its new cloak, then maybe, just maybe, it could have washed itself off the filth accumulated over at least the last three decades, and start walking down the road of national reconciliation. Then, it could truly have called itself a People’s Party. For now, it will only remain “Parti PePe” (Hopefully not "Parti Pipi").

Article by Cuhnelbald - http://cuhnelbald.blogspot.com/