Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Nov 21, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
When the Ronald Reagan Government in the US in 1983 invaded Grenada, the brother of Guyana’s famous hero, Walter Rodney, was at my home. The resulting curfew stopped travel on the island, so Donald pitched tent with me and my wife.
We lived in close range of a number of strategic institutions like Radio Grenada and the Soviet Embassy, so there was intense bombing and gunfights around us. Two Cubans died not too far from my home.
During the endless discussions on Guyanese politics, Donald said something to me that is an important lesson that the people who make up life on Planet Earth should take note of. It forms the core of a universal mistake that humans have made since time immemorial. Donald intoned that since the international headlines on his brother’s assassination, people had “Walter Rodney” expectations of him and that was the attitude he received wherever he went in and out of Guyana.
Donald said that though the expectation was natural, he wasn’t a political animal like his brother, didn’t want to be a revolutionary, had no intention of being an anti-dictatorship actor and only wanted to live the life of a professional quantity surveyor. Most people have the expectation that once you come from a noted medical family or a rich background in engineering or a famous athletic family, you will go that route. It is wrong to see people in that context.
I now return to the comparison between Donald Ramotar and Bharrat Jagdeo as promised last week. A majority of Guyanese, including this columnist, believed that after the 2006 election, Mr. Jagdeo, achieving twelve years of power before he demitted office, would want to eclipse Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan. This is the mistake all humans make. Mr. Jagdeo had no such dream.
We began to be severe on him because as the years passed on, Mr. Jagdeo wasn’t doing anything innovative, phenomenal or even un-traditional.
The brutal fact, which at the Freudian level we blocked out of our mind because this is the way humans are nurtured to think, was that Jagdeo had not even an inch of intention of wanting to have a legacy, wanting to leave his name in the history books, wanting to be a great president that people will remember more than Burnham and Jagan. Jagdeo came from a rural background where the hustler mentality prevailed.
He was essentially a hustler leader who was fascinated with the class of rich and wealthy folks. Mr. Jagdeo must have laughed at all of us each day he sat down in his presidential chair saying to himself; “Let them go on thinking I will do something great, I know what I want and they can go to hell with their expectations.”
He is gone and no one will ever remember him for anything fantastic much less great. We are making the same mistake with Ramotar. This time, I’m not going to break away from tradition and think outside the box.
Donald Ramotar is the type of politician who lived his entire political life in the shadows of people inside the PPP that he felt and feels are the crème de la crème of the PPP. He worships these people and accepts their superior thinking. It is not that he is afraid to make changes and be his own man. He does not think he should be his own man when there are others in the PPP that can take the PPP and the government to heights he cannot move them into.
In other words, Donald Ramotar is not interested in a legacy, has no dream of surpassing the two historical icons (Burnham and Jagan) and has no intention of coveting a historical page for himself.
The people who write the Stabroek News editorials should sooner rather than later come to this reality. In many editorial flections on Mr. Ramotar, they lament his willingness to remain cocooned in New Garden Street doing nothing noteworthy.
We want to think that once a person is a president of a nation that person is going to carve out a historical niche.
We end with a crucial difference between Jagdeo and Ramotar and the balance sheet of Mr. Jagdeo proves this. Despite his lack of intellectual depth and his overall mediocrity, Mr. Jagdeo had confidence in himself, knew what he wanted out of his presidency for himself, and was not afraid to speak his mind and seek confrontation.
Mr. Ramotar lacks these dispositions. He is so unsure of himself and will remain like that until he leaves.
Jagdeo giving Exxon 102 cent to collect 2 cent.
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