Latest update February 7th, 2025 2:57 PM
Feb 22, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
There is a letter in the Friday edition (Feb. 19) of KN in which former Prime Minister Samuel Hinds waxed lyrical about his leader, Bharrat Jagdeo. Mr. Hinds has been sending letters to the Kaieteur News quiet often. It gives one the impression that he is still active in politics. At age 74 and existing outside Parliament and the inner circles of the PPP, such an impression is misleading. Mr. Hinds’ administrative and political career is over. It is this analyst’s belief that the PPP will not win in 2020 and if they do, Mr. Hinds will be 78. It is virtually impossible for him to be made the Prime Minister as he wasn’t chosen in 2015 for the PM slot on the PPP ticket.
So why these frequent viewpoints in the letter columns, the latest one being a panegyric of Bharrat Jagdeo? First, I think the PPP hasn’t got one African Guyanese face that does not invoke anger in Black people. In that vacuum, the PPP has called on Hinds. Hinds was not an achiever despite being the longest serving Prime Minister in the Caribbean (beating Eric Wiliams of Trinidad who had 20 years but part of it was as Premier).
He was not good at spin or rhetoric or exciting delivery. Hinds as Prime Minister, never implemented any original ideas of his own. But Hinds was good as Mr. Clean. He never had an accusation hurled against him involving money.
Having only one credible Black face, the PPP has asked Hinds to do PR work in the press. Mr. Hinds obliges because he is a pliant and pliable PPP foot soldier. Secondly, and as a spin off from number one is the fact that Mr. Hinds is the only important leader from the PPP the past fifteen years that has not been involved directly or indirectly in conspiratorial violence.
The truth is no individual can point a finger at Hinds and say that you did this to me or that to me. Every PPP leader has been involved in either victimizing people, directing violence against them or is facing serious accusation of financial gain when in office.
The ugly situation facing the PPP is that every time its leaders, except Hinds, pens a letter in the press or opens his/her mouth in Parliament or at a press conference, Guyanese are either angry or they laugh at that person because these people have been shameless dictators. So the PPP puts Hinds in front.
Of course I can anticipate criticism from my portrait of Hinds here so let me quickly stitch in the case of his son who was about to face jail time but the Magistrate, Ms. Gita Chandan-Edmonds was sacked by the Judicial Service Commission. The APNU+AFC has been ten months in office and that lady has not been reinstated. I need to remind readers that the President of Guyana is a trained historian and therefore ought to have internalized the lessons of history.
If the PPP continues to use Hinds for cosmetic surgery, the point of diminishing return will set in. Hinds writes nonsense on the PPP’s record of service, nationalism and economic development. Maybe Dr. Cheddie Jagan and Mrs Janet Jagan as President were nationalists but certainly not Bharrat Jagdeo. Mr. Jagdeo was very contemptuous of state institutions and was a huge sycophant of foreign capital, especially Chinese investors.
Guyana’s natural resources were squandered under Jagdeo. In office, according to Mr. Hinds in that letter, the PPP set itself a higher bar. I will ask readers to forgive my resort to satire but it is gushing out of me to say which bar – chocolate bar or bar of soap? Mr. Jagdeo abused his wife which he referred to as First Lady knowing fully well that he had refused to sign the papers to make the marriage legal. Who set what kind of bar there?
Under the Jagdeo/Ramotar cabal, corruption became morbid. Political repression was nasty. Racism became rampant. Mr. Jagdeo got an injunction from Justice Chang restraining me from repeating the words of a column in which I referred to Jagdeo as an ideological racist. Mr. Chang is gone. Finally, I would like to warn Mr. Hinds not to quote me in his PPP masquerade against the Government of Guyana.
In that Friday missive he cites my condemnation of the APNU+AFC’s policy of the extension of the barriers around Parliament. I am annoyed at Hinds for quoting me when the very Hinds never offered me even a modicum of an apology for the oppression I suffered under his Government. Don’t do it again, Sam.
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