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Mar 03, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Guyana is the most unique country in the world. It is the only land where a student goes to university not to learn but to control the institution. The University of Guyana must be dancing with joy since Monday afternoon. It has as one of its chief policy-makers, a person who wants to be president of the nation.
Last Monday, Gail Teixiera, Cheddi Jagan’s protégé attended the statutory meeting of the Council of the University where she became chief whip. Readers would know Ms. Teixeira is contesting the position of presidential candidate for the PPP in the upcoming election.
The University of Guyana Council now has eight PPP card-bearing members including four PPP parliamentarians.
Ms Teixeira has been put there to further control the institution in this an election year. She vividly reminds me of the communist cadres in the now defunct USSR and the fascist mandarins of the Third Reich.
Overbearingly inflexible and obsessed with achieving total power for the party and leader, Ms. Teixeira comes straight out of a movie about Nazi Germany.
I was unable to see the chief whip in operation. While the Council was in session, I was teaching.
My students of course are more important to me than any Council meeting especially now that Ms. Teixeira has taken over. I did go in just ten minutes before the meeting was over and man, the place looked like a room in Freedom House.
It is the old story of the PPP – it must have hegemony over every corner of Guyana. It continues with its hegemonic ways because the population of Guyana remains passive.
Gail of course isn’t going to make the University proud of her because she isn’t going to become the President of Guyana.
The PPP has come face to face with reality for the first time in its long political activism and that is there is no Jagan in the potpourri. That ingredient has long gone.
The PPP then has to put forward a human being that has to stand on his/her own. Jagdeo won in 2001 and 2006 because the Indian people were urged by Mrs. Jagan to vote for Cheddi’s party.
Cheddi is dead and the party he founded doesn’t bear his stamp any longer. It is still there but the Indian people hardly recognise it. The PPP has to find an acceptable human being that will impress thousands of young voters. Certainly Ms. Teixeira is not that human being.
Completely lacking in charisma, Ms. Teixeira cultivated the role of party loyalist and party custodian. She was never a people’s person. She never demonstrated intellectual talent. Like her realpolitik colleague, Clement Rohee, she basked in the invincibility of the Jagans.
The Jagans are dead and their invincibility was buried with them. Teixeira and Rohee now have to survive using their wits. They cannot. enter the Shakespearean players.
It needs repeating that Gail Teixeira’s entry into the PPP’s race is to serve the interest of her Leviathan (see my column, “Orpheus Descending: The story of Gail Teixeira,” KN Feb 12). Rohee and Teixeira virtually has been characters.
They have no political capital. None is politically liked; none have political finesse to provide them with electoral longevity. To ensure their survival, they have agreed to become the Leviathan’s sycophants. Both of these circus actors know fully well that they cannot win a boy scout’s race much less a national election.
The Leviathan needs to ensure that if the PPP wins the forthcoming contest, there will be a President that will not point an accusing finger. The maximum leader will do anything to keep Nagamootoo out and certainly do not welcome a Ramkarran presidency
Since Nagamootoo is gone, the possibility of a Ramkarran’s victory in the deliberations of the PPP’s central committee is a distinct possibility.
What the maximum leader has done is to call in Teixeira and Rohee to do a demolition job on Ramkarran.
Viewed as the person that is most likely to follow a Jaganite pathway, Ramkarran will pull votes from traditional PPP leaders. Since Janet Jagan proteged Rohee and Cheddi nurtured Teixeira, their supporters would side with Ramkarran.
But since Rohee and Teixeira are in the race themselves then obviously their supporters will give them their ballots instead of Ramkarran. Those ballots would have been crucial to Ramkarran.
The plain and simple task of Rohee and Teixeira is to split the vote. They will do that and Ramkarran will be defeated. But Rohee and Teixeira will get a rude awakening after the national elections.
JAGDEO ADDING MORE DANGER TO GUYANA AND THE REGION
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