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Oct 18, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
We live with a paroxysm of angst cascading down the rivulets of our minds each day we pick up the newspapers. Is Guyana an imaginary island where Greek mythological monsters chain you to the trees and brutally tantalize you as they did to Prometheus? Or are we living in a society that is real but in which everyone is permanently dizzy, drowning in a vortex of incredible ironies?
The answer is that Guyana is real. Bharrat Jagdeo’s twelve years of autocracy did happen. And Donald Ramotar made the most ill-treated field slave look like a powerfully passionate form of Spartacus. It is not what is occurring in Guyana that is driving vertigo into your brain, it is what you read about the sagas in Brazilian and American politics. We start with Trump. If we ever thought that Trump had a chance of pipping Mrs. Clinton for the presidency that idea is dead.
The sexual scandals have killed his presidential potential. Only paid campaigners and fanatical followers of Trump will accept that he can still become the president. Trump is swimming in a destructive sea of sexual scandals. Things he did twenty, fifteen, ten years ago have come back to devour his political career. Here in Guyana, the Opposition Leader is on the rampage accusing the Coalition regime of favoured appointments, illegal dismissals; the works.
Is the society sleeping? One of the most damning accusations against a sitting president anywhere in the world is contained in a press statement by Varshnie Singh against Bharrat Jagdeo. Ms. Singh’s dossier on mistreatment by Jagdeo is hell-raising. With the anti-women tirades of Trump making headlines around the globe, it is not inappropriate to ask if Jagdeo should hold the title of Opposition Leader.
Strangely, our “bold,” “no-nonsense,” “feminist,” women groups in Guyana are still dizzy from the confusion the PPP is creating; mental straightforwardness is dormant. They are yet to pronounce on Jagdeo’s eligibility to lead exactly one half of the Parliament’s representatives.
Only one group has been brave to declare Jagdeo unfit to be a Parliamentarian. It is the Coalition for the 1823 Monument. See the August 10 edition of the Kaieteur News with the caption, “Speaker to consider proposed changes for Code of Conduct by Civil Society members.”
As a social activist for all my life, I am in the throes of vertigo each day since the PPP lost power in 2015. You have to be mentally lacerated when you tune into the local news on television or pick up the newspapers. Two wrongs do not and cannot make a right. When the PPP accuses the Coalition Government of special appointees, it doesn’t mean because the PPP did it when Jagdeo and Ramotar were autocratically in overdrive that the Coalition is right to practice the same thing.
But there is a huge but. But the PPP won’t even acknowledge they did it and assure us they will not do it again. In other words, the PPP wants to obfuscate history. They do not want the Guyanese people to know about the evil they perpetuated. It is never easy to bring family members in politics, whether writing as a journalist or as an activist in the political battlefield. But little reminders may not be irreverent and irrelevant.
President Ramotar’s son and daughter held very lucrative public jobs when Ramotar was president. Lisa Ramotar is still the CEO of the Gold Board. Cousins, aunts, nephews and uncles and nieces of the PPP’s pyramid held prominent positions in the public sector. Sons and daughters, nieces and nephews were given scholarships to western universities while other Guyanese children were assigned to Cuba.
Mr. Jagdeo, in 2016, has conveniently forgotten his twelve years of power when incestuousness emanated from Freedom House as when a tsunami devastates a little boat adrift on a little island. Walter Rodney must be quoted for a beautiful statement he once made about undemocratic rulers. He said if they were not afraid that the words would stick in their throats.
When Gail Teixeira complained about disparaging Facebook comments against her by certain APNU-AFC officials, wasn’t she afraid that she may have choked on her own words?
When Jagdeo addressed his press conference and said that the Government has assailed Parliament and referred to Parliament as the place of “our democracy,” wasn’t he afraid that God may have struck him down? When Donald Ramotar wrote his letter about the Coalition’s destruction of the sugar industry, wasn’t he afraid that as his lying fingers move on the keyboard, fate may have paralyzed him?
By the way, there are charges of corruption against PPP officers in Region Six. Bad habits don’t die.
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