Rohee and Ramkarran are in self-destructive mood

Sep 18, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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There is nothing wrong with Ministers of the Government and leaders of the ruling party sermonizing their supporters with their “achievements.” But commonsense and a certain amount of strategizing must be present. Clement Rohee and presidential hopeful, Ralph Ramkarran, have chosen to shoot themselves with their own weapon.
Instead of searching the seventeen-year-old governorship of their party for some semblance of success, they chose with an inexplicable Freudian destructiveness, to cite the most atrocious failures of their party’s rule and pass them on as accomplishments. It is an amazing display of Freudian sub-conscious at work.
Here is Mr. Rohee in a published letter in SN in its September 2nd issue; “The PPP/C administration is not committed to talking shop about corruption; on the contrary, it is committed to rooting out corruption wherever and whenever it is to be found.” The last thing that should have come out of Mr. Rohee’s mouth were those words.
Even the most racist supporters of the PPP who would go out onto the streets and die for the cause of the PPP have voiced strong condemnation about the growth and encouragement of corruption. Corruption has been and continues to be the nemesis of the PPP. It has destroyed the image and credibility of the PPP.
In any change of government, the PPP leaders who held state positions would probably be prosecuted. The PPP Government at the present time is the most corrupt regime in the history of the West Indies.  Mr. Rohee is best advised to continue his campaign without even the slightest mention of the word, “corruption.”  He will be ridiculed.
Mr. Ralph Ramkarran has replaced Mrs. Jagan as the Mirror columnist (the party newspaper).
Like Mrs. Jagan who used up her column space writing the most ridiculous things as in the example that Guyana offers better medical service than the US because medical treatment here is free, Mr. Ramkarran has continued in that tradition.
Week after week, we are treated to his bizarre interpretation of local and international politics.
He informed us that there is no need for a commission of inquiry into the Clico catastrophe because the court is the best forum to iron out the problems and the matter is in front of the courts. Mr. Ramkarran, contrary to international sentiments, wrote that the street protest in Teheran was a threat to the Iranian Revolution. There was no mention by Mr. Ramkarran that the demonstrations were about the barefaced rigging of the presidential elections. Imagine of all people that overlooks rigged elections, is a PPP leader.
Here are the words of Mr. Ramkarran in his latest piece for the Mirror; “The current political climate offers possibilities. “Conditions are now emerging which suggest that the development of a form of expanded political and ethnic unity that currently exists is now possible.”  Is Mr. Ramkarran living in Guyana? What is he talking about? Even under Forbes Burnham’s rule, racial winds were not as torrential as they are now.
Cheddi Jagan acted as a conduit to ensure that anti-African feelings among Indians did not boil over. In Guyana today, the level of racial antagonism has never been greater than since the sixties. The Buxton mayhem and Lusignan Massacre are a testimony to a tragic demise of racial tolerance
Two tyrannies are occurring at the same time, which threaten the very existence of this nation.
One is the irrational descent into elected dictatorship that has deteriorated so terribly that it makes the Burnham era look like a good government that made some bad mistakes. Secondly, the level of discrimination has taken on dimensions that are more frightening than when Indians felt that they were being sidelined by the PNC under Burnham. In the midst of this pathological vortex comes the campaign speech of Ralph Ramkarran that at the moment, great possibilities are opening up for political and racial unity.
What could the possible explanation be for these weird campaign themes of Rohee and Ramkarran? It may have to do with lack of achievements over the seventeen years, so both of these politicians would have to create fact out of fiction. Even if the Berbice Bridge and the Berbice (Tain) University are cited to the Corentyne flock, what is there to serenade the Indians of Essequibo and Demerara with?
As the campaign heats up and the Freudian sub-conscious runs out of control, there is the anticipation that all PPP leaders will tell their supporters that the PPP is an administration with a huge record of success against the country’s big drug lords. They haven’t caught even one of them as yet.

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