There are over 300 hundred “Wikileaks” documents on Guyana

Dec 01, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I attended the ACDA wake for the late Winston Murray on Sunday evening. When there was a snacks break, people gathered into little corners of the ACDA pavilion and chatted on their own, personal topics.
One of the encounters I had was about the sale of public property behind the Sparendaam Police Station which has gone for $5 million per acre. The President is putting up a mansion there (if Khurshid Sattaur could call my upper working class home a mansion, there won’t be words for him to describe what Mr. Jagdeo is building there) and so are many other PPP kings.
Strangely, Dr. Compton Bourne of the Caribbean Development Bank has a plot there as was reported in this newspaper two Sundays ago
Nicknamed Pradoville 2, what is going on there is an act that is utterly shameless. One Minister has bought huge plots of land from the sale of Leonora estate from Guysuco. This man has a large home he built behind Leonora Police Station. How come he got an acre of public land in Sparendaam for $5 million?
My point to the PNC person who was talking to me at the wake was that the PNC, AFC and other stakeholders allowed the PPP Government and the Jagdeo presidency to do whatever it chose to with the resources of the country because there is no opposition. Now the degeneracy is beyond imagination.
This is the way a dictatorship behaves. Add to the nature of dictatorship, the PPP’s own peculiar brand of oligarchy and you have a phantasmagoria of authoritarian nightmares. The Pradoville 2 scandal is just the latest episode of this nightmarish terror.
There are two features to note about elite rule in Guyana. One is that it is a dictatorship and therefore it embodies the main features of autocracy – irrationality, insensitivity, immorality but most of all, invincibility. The latter characteristic of invincibility comes about through society’s fear and apathy.
Totalitarian regimes never emerge from the wilderness with their invincibility intact. Their omnipotence is derived from the latitude given to them by a jaded, tired, frightened population and an inept, foolish opposition.
In Guyana, the Jagdeo administration has tested the waters more times than we can count and has succeeded. This is how invincibility comes into play. A dictatorship embarks on an egregiously immoral and blatantly illegal path. The opposition allows it to proceed. It will do similar acts a million times over.
In Guyana, some of these pathways are so morally and legally nasty that confrontation from the opposition had to be the only option available. I honestly don’t know where to start.
No one in this country except Mr. Jagdeo and a few of his elites know about the lie detector tests given to CANU officers and what are the results. We are told Mr. This and Mr. That failed the test. How do we know that? I have been told that there are over 300 US Embassy cables on Guyana in the Wikileaks cache and it would be interesting to read what the Kingston building had to say about drug trafficking in Guyana.
I have been told, also, that the server is congested so the Guyana cables are not released as yet. I hope what is said about the Jagdeo regime in those cables will finally galvanize Guyanese to act against totalitarianism in Guyana.
Add to the general features of dictatorship, the peculiar instincts of the PPP and you have a recipe for disaster in Guyana. The Jagans have nurtured in all their underlings a sense of manifest destiny. Coupled with this was the insistence that Georgetown is a hostile place to the PPP and will not permit that manifest destiny to appear.
So two morbid instincts are embedded in PPP leaders – they are destined to rule Guyana and envious forces in the population will never allow that.
These two traits are at the heart of the PPP’s exercise of power. When the PPP won the 1992 elections, Cheddi and Janet came face to face with their dream of manifest destiny – like Lenin,
Cheddi Jagan was born to lead Guyana and the historic vanguard PPP into a future of greatness. How does this tie in with the concept and behaviour of dictatorship? If you are fated to be messianic then no one should question your motive. You feel that you can do what you want because the lesser mortals are too inferior to be questioning your action.
The die is cast – from Pradoville 2 it is anyone’s guess where the next stop is.