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Dec 16, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
A group of us was hanging out at the Stabroek Market Square when some cadres of the Youth and Students Movement (YSM) of the PNC came up to sell us the New Nation, the organ of the PNC.
We bought the newspaper and continued with our lime. A citizen, in a very vexed tone, began to engage the YSM youths. He was shouting very loudly denouncing the present leadership of the PNC. He wanted stronger action against the PPP and opined that if it was Desmond Hoyte, the PPP would have been in trouble long ago.
David Hinds and Michael Carrington left where we were sitting and went over to join the debate. I was left alone on the bench with my New Nation in my hand. I began to go through the New Nation (vol. 57, no. 11, Nov. 2014, special 50th anniversary edition). It is 12 tabloid size pages devoted to the leadership of Forbes Burnham and his achievements.
There are thirteen photographs of Mr. Burnham in different environments. There are seventeen photographs of things and places that were built under Burnham’s leadership and dozens and dozens of listed items of Burnham’s accomplishments. Under the subject of agriculture, there are 21 transformative projects that Mr. Burnham pioneered.
I kept reading the New Nation totally oblivious to the debate that the gentleman was carrying on literally about six feet away from where I sat with the YSM youths and David Hinds and Michael Carrington even though the decibels were reverberating. Then my reflections began. You would hardly think that someone can have reflections while sitting next to a crowd in a jam-packed liming site in a market square where the smell of beer permeates the night as when smoke enveloped the sky from a huge fire.
Here was a group of young Guyanese extolling the virtues of a past president whose commitment to democracy I find intellectually, morally and politically questionable. But it was not what I was thinking that was the more important reflection, but what their thoughts were of Burnham. Were they right to be celebrating the legacy of this past President? Could their action be justified?
Context is everything and in the context of PPP’s hegemony in the 21st century, Mr. Burnham’s rule in the context of the immediate post-colonial period needs the utilization of revisionist perspectives. To understand why PNC members and supporters are rejuvenating the personality, accomplishments, legacy and politics of Forbes Burnham, one has to situate Guyanese politics in the comparative mode of Burnham then and the PPP now.
It is the now that is so bad that when the now of the PPP is juxtaposed alongside the then of Burnham, revisionism yields fantastic results that favour Burnham. The brutal reality that this columnist must face is that despite Burnham’s meanness to this columnist and his role in either the planning or the turning of a blind eye to the planning of Walter Rodney’s death, in the comparison and juxtaposition of Burnham’s PNC in power, 1964-1985 and the PPP in power, 1992 -2014, the Burnham era’s mixture of an imperial constitution and authoritarian use of power was less profane, immoral, racist, violent, brutal, corrupt, criminal and pathological than the Jagdeo/Ramotar period.
My wife, daughter and I attended a small cocktail event last Saturday. As can be predicted, political dissection of the PPP comes up whenever I am greeted. And the pattern of greeting me was no different last Saturday. Former state employees would say to me, “Freddie, it is true man, these people are worse than Burnham.”
I get that sentiment all the time from state employees who worked under Burnham, Hoyte, Jagdeo and now Ramotar.
Last Saturday, a former GUYSUCO manager was the latest person to echo that sentiment. And a description would follow. He told me things (just like all the others) of how different the administration of Guyana was and how professionalized were the relations at GUYSUCO under the PNC Government.
Guyanese from all walks of life, 55 years and over, in countless numbers, lament to me the shock they still go through as to what the PPP has become and how far more terrible are the PPP rulers than when the PNC was in Government.
I saw the unfolding of this horror show as early as 2001. In 2005, the stewardship of President Bharrat Jagdeo had deteriorated on every level – morality, good manners, nationalist love for country, democratic accountability, respect for the rule of law, descent into violence and murder – that I use the term, “fascistization” to describe the PPP’s autocracy.
In 2014, the fascistization process is complete.
LISTEN HOW JAGDEO WILL MAKE ALL GUYANESE RICH!!!
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