Cheddi Jagan: The application of revisionist history

Dec 10, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I remember at a book launching forum, the son of Cheddi Jagan, Dr. Joey Jagan got up and told the audience that if I were present he would slap me. Joey Jagan repeated that desire on a television programme with CN Sharma.
Here were the words of the Guyana Press Association on Jagan’s threat; “For Dr Jagan to threaten to slap Mr. Kissoon for his views, is to open the floodgates for anyone to attack a media worker who holds a differing point of view… we would also ask him to desist from threatening any media worker… Mr. Kissoon’s views are sacrosanct as are Dr Jagan’s, who often spoke scathingly about many people, not least among them the hierarchy of the PPP.”
Joey Jagan was reacting to the countless columns of mine on his father, Dr. Cheddi Jagan, in which I made use of the revisionist methodology. I have long considered Cheddi Jagan a prime subject for the revisionist approach, because I do not think he has been fully exposed for being a very destructive politician. The two Jagan offspring – Joey and Nadira – resent people criticising their parents who on their own spent over sixty years in politics and had state power.
The daughter told the Guyana Chronicle that she hates anyone who criticizes her mother and went on to say that this is her unapologetic view. It never occurred and perhaps will never occur to these two offspring that their parents may have done terrible things to people that they do not know about. So it would be the decent thing to research and learn.
This is human nature and such feelings will never go away from human society. Mikhaila Puran and her brother Mikel, were angry and published some nasty remarks about me on my criticism of their father, attorney-at-law Vic Puran. I replied to tell them I knew their father long before they were ever born; that there were dimensions to Puran that they may not have seen.
This is human nature and such sentiments will be with us until civilization dies. I remember an American President once uttered these words about the Nicaraguan dictator, General Somoza; “He’s a son of a bitch but he is our son-of -a-bitch.” At least there is an element of candour, reality and decency in that statement.
“Nothing is self-destructive in saying that I know my father did many wrongs to many people, that I apologize for his mistakes, but he is my father and I see him as a hero.”
One expected that when one saw a letter by Forbes Burnham’s daughter, Roxanne, in the press last August in which she waxed lyrical about her father, there would have been some acknowledgement of wrongdoing. But there was none.
Joey Jagan, Nadira Jagan, Roxanne Burnham, the Puran siblings may go on singing songs of praise to their parents, but the historians will hardly be amused. The historians’ role is to search for the facts, even if not the truths of history. If and when they find it, their role is to record what they discover despite the venom it may bring out in the loved ones of the subjects.
Former WPA activist, Bonita Bone-Harris published an interesting letter last week. The contents make you wonder if Cheddi Jagan was corrupt.
She noted; “I was asked by the new President, Dr Cheddi Jagan, to sit on the Board of Directors of the National Bank of Industry & Commerce. While a member of the Board, a decision was taken, presumably by powerful elements in the then PPP government, to sell our national bank to Republic Bank of Trinidad & Tobago. I don’t know what other directors knew, only that I did not know why the Bank was being sold, how much the Bank was worth to a potential buyer or how much it was selling for or was eventually sold for. This was not a Board matter!”
Jagan had to know about all of this. It strains the imagination to think that President Jagan didn’t know that the Board was being bypassed. He had to know and he had to have an input into the selling of the bank. There is no doubt in my mind if the identical story had surrounded the presidency of Forbes Burnham and Desmond Hoyte, there would have been a deluge of questions about the integrity of these two presidents and whether the purchaser had bribed them. So why can’t we ask the same question of Cheddi Jagan? Was the Cheddi Jagan Government corrupt?

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