Hinckson, Moseley and the intensification of elected dictatorship

Jul 17, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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CN Sharma played into the hands of the government. Of course he could have been set up. Someone could have been planted to say a seditious word against the President so as to get Sharma into trouble.

No honest person in this country believes that the man’s license should have been suspended for an extended period of four months.

But had there been no threatening call, Government would have had to wait for Sharma to slip.
In the case of Gordon Moseley, the story is one of the intensification of elected dictatorship.

In my theory of elected dictatorship, I have argued that the autocratic governors are not concerned with the prospect of being voted out.

Some feel, like Putin in Russia, the PPP in Guyana, the PPP in Pakistan, Mugabe in Zimbabwe that they will continuously win forthcoming elections.

What happens then is that legitimately elected rulers descend into political despotism and legal Machiavellianism.

Elected dictatorship of course has to be distinguished from tyranny in that the authoritarian rulers in illiberal democracy can be voted out of office whereas brutal systems, like oligarchic tyranny in places like Burma and Cuba, have enduring life. Guyana’s situation makes for the worst case scenario.

Given our ethnically based voting patterns, elected dictatorship can easily slip into totalitarian control because Freedom House accepts the inevitability of our electoral demographic shape.

My theory on this page since the last general election is that PPP’s authoritarian madness would have intensified because the PPP itself was surprised that it won a majority at the August 2006 poll.

That victory did something phenomenal for the collective psyche of the PPP – it told the Freedom House oligarchs that they were invincible.

It was a tremendous psychological apocalypse for the PPP. They themselves did not believe that the East Indians would have stayed the course with them.

Politically, August 2006 marked the final decline of this nation. The PPP is now saturated with the syndrome of messianic aura. The result is dictatorship.

A caveat is in order here. I do believe many of the autocratic atrophies we are seeing are not the direct inventions of Freedom House because I do recognize there is a split between Freedom House and New Garden Street.

However, without Mr. Jagdeo, elected dictatorship was the likely outcome anyway, even under Cheddi Jagan. Jagan and his protégés, who are in power now, at the psychic level, do not accept liberal democracy.

They are in fact highly cynical and deeply contemptuous of all the values that inhere in liberal democracy. For them these are bourgeois falsities and deceptions.

If one examines, Mr. Jagdeo’s style of politics since the August 2006 victory, you can detect a sense of triumphalism.

Mr. Jagdeo and the PPP are telling us in subtle and not so subtle ways that they are invincible and unbeatable. The concatenation of atrocious and deplorable policies since August 2006 has been relentless.

One can say that since August 2006 the Guyana Government is on a dictatorship train that is out of control. Go back to August 2006 and you see one nasty violation after another. There has been no pause.

Examine the runaway train since then. Soon after the election, ministers were sworn in without being appointed Members of Parliament.

The courts ruled that the President did not commit an illegality. The autocratic habit from that moment has travelled faster than sound.

The year 2008 is halfway through and look at the shape of elected dictatorship – torture of suspects, refusal to hold enquires into national tragedies, constitutional violations, reaffirmation of the radio monopoly, the nonchalant rejection of the Freedom of Information Bill of Mr. Trotman, the Hinckson case and many more too numerous to mention.

We arrived at the sixties. The time machine has taken us back to Premier Cheddi Jagan and his ban on Kit Nascimento.

The Gordon Moseley ban is just another example of the theatre of the absurd that the Government of Guyana has cocooned itself in.

All over the world, democratic leaders have to live with journalists whom they feel do not report them correctly.

On leaving his Prime Minister job, Tony Blair referred to the media as a feral beast but he never banned a journalist from his press conference. The lessons of the past have shown that dictators after a while become irrational.

It had to be an irrational act to tell a journalist how she/he must report the head of a government.
In Moseley’s case he was also told he was disrespectful in his letter of defence.

I hope Moseley replies to that and informs the younger minds of Guyana that people who want respect from others must earn it.

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