The PPP – a high-level sketch

Jun 23, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – The People’s Progressive Party (PPP) is as old as Guyana.  Well, almost.  What can be said of it, where it is today, with the utmost clarity, in complete frankness?  The first virtue is that honesty must feature thoroughly in any sketch, and it cannot be much more than that, of a political group that has had its inspirations.  In more recent years, however, it has enjoyed electoral success, but has nonetheless fallen on barren times.  Ethical barrenness.  Leadership emptiness.  Characterless (and classless) men and women.  A core and a soul competing for a claim to the greater rottenness.  Where to start?  Who to begin with, put under the center of the radar?  Those are but two of the many challenges.  Still, I must try, while honoring those who have given their loyalty and life to a party that now teems with the pungent, the putrid, and the profaning.  Of necessity, a start must be made with Cheddi Jagan.

Dr. Cheddi Jagan was a man true to his beliefs, to his countrymen, to what was his foundation, for which he is known, and which cannot be forgotten.  His wife had her way, her say, her little stay, and soon enough was shown her way.  In a nutshell, there went the heart of the original PPP with a bow to Chase and Hubbard and Jacob of earlier note, and the likes of Ramotar and Ramkarran and Rohee, as time went on.  They lived and would die for the party.  They weren’t quite my kind of thinkers, but I doff my hat at their blind allegiance to a man, a myth, and still to what has now eased and then raced into the ranks of monstrousness.  It is the new PPP.  Be it old PPP or new PPP, the core of supporters were part of the rocks and salt of Guyana.  Simple citizens.  Hardworking people.  Trusting and faithful people.  People taken for granted, then given a kick or a kiss.  It has been their tragic fate to be made to pay a bitter price for their still unswerving commitments to what is not just an assault on the national conscience, but a national crime syndicate.  It is the PPP of this new millennium.

The new breed of the PPP is a low breed.  It may be quarter of one thing, half of something, and three quarters of another, but it is now almost 100% all darkness and what is destructive to people, nation, and interests.  Perhaps, a comparison may be timely, of unerring assistance for those who are stuck on the fence, with their minds hanging in the balance.

It is true that Cheddi Jagan could be rightly pigeonholed as an ideologue.  But who in Guyana, be he or she of the PPP or PNC, could describe him as a demagogue?  Listen to what the supporters of the PPP and citizens of this country live with today, and is that not it today?  A demagogue of the meanest, nastiest, ugliest sort?  Cheddi Jagan and Donald Ramotar could engage in what is best identified as a few lengthy monologues.  But has anybody ever heard those two shining PPP lights descend to, articulate, what can only be accurately said to be nothing but male vagina monologues?  When there should be a willingness to engage in dialogue for the benefit of this country, there is diatribe after diatribe, often once a week, then on any given day that pleases.  Cheddi and Janet could bluff as the best that Guyana had to offer.  But no Guyanese, not even their sworn enemies, would stoop so low as to mistake their bluffs for buffoonery. I look at a PPP brain trust, and I behold a body, a conscience overtaken by chicanery, the upper levels of a national political party that is a walking, shouting crime wave.

Who is not a payroll snatcher is a body snatcher.  The ones that are not pathological liars are unblushing tricksters, ambushers, fraudsters.  They talk about rules and the rule of law with a loud public voice.  But behind closed doors, the real PPP and its real leadership ambitions come out in technicolor: it is about the rogueries that include tying bundles with desperadoes, outlaws, and assorted schemers who plot how to drain the national treasury.  Rules with a straight face; while, at the same time, the hands of a small army of donors and financiers are shaken, their dark money collected, their dirty deeds condoned.  I invite the partisan to examine the state of local institutions that should be of unalterable merit.  When finished with that exercise, they should spare a moment, and consider how other institutions inside the US Government operate, what they deliver.  Guyana doesn’t need an American Ambassador as their new Governor General.  This humble but proud Guyanese doesn’t.  The rest of Guyana may be impressed, even awed, but not I.  But there it was that Her Excellency spoke in solemn officious tones, and all the powerful PPP boys were off in a frenzied gallop to sweep the local stables clean.  I have said a few things endlessly: pick company carefully.  Wine and dine sparsely.  Accept money even more cautiously.  My Lord, my God!  Is this Guyana of ours, still a country, a proud sovereignty?  Or is it a crowded penitentiary, subject to the commands of the wardens that grind the weak and foolish into the dust?  So much for free and fair.  If this is what is free, then give me the chains and the stocks.  All I ask is for the freedom to keep my conscience.  And if it isn’t granted, I will seize it, and no one can take it away.  Not the dirty, sickly, PPP.  Not the imperious Yankee.  The PPP is always running to America.  America came and kicked out Jagan, then Burnham, later Hoyte.  Now America comes again.  This time it is for them, those in the new PPP.

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• Cheddi Jagan, ethical, GHK Lall, Guyana, People’s Progressive Party (PPP)

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