The Guyanese Machiavelli

Oct 17, 2024 Peeping Tom

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Hard Truths by GHK Lall…

Kaieteur News – Some may call what Vice President Bharat Jagdeo does for a living by different names, but they all amount to the same thing.  The first is manipulation, the second is Machiavellian, the third is mastery of men, some men crass enough and craven enough to fall under his guiles, his dubious charms.  Remember something throughout this offering: the three fundamentals of manipulation are usually present in the Big Boss’s manoeuvres around the panting for a place in his firmament.  Jagdeo’s three fundamentals of manipulating weak men follow this pattern: invite, incentivize, then incarcerate.  A second standard in the PPP General Secretary’s and national chief policymaker’s approach is that he places the highest premium on total loyalty, blind loyalty.  In Jagdeo’s book of political wisdom, loyalty comes out ahead of ability every day in the month.  Better still for Barry, the Guyanese Machiavelli, and worse yet for those who fall prey to his lures, the Big Man in Guyana is in the market for something of a special kind: he desires more than rank obedience. Jagdeo demands total subservience from those who collect his favours.  He wants them to fawn over him, grin and grovel and bear under his boot, and brownnose his person to his heart’s content.  It is how he controls them, humiliates them, binds them to him.

Take one test case, that of someone who allowed his ambitions to get the better of his head.  Jagdeo dangled a carrot, a prize that veteran comrades hungered for, would give a certain, ah, private part of their anatomy for, only for him to arrange the grandest of promotions to one who fell hook, line, and sinker for all that should have represented supreme standing, and no less in the power equation.  It has turned out to be one hell of a poison chalice: cutting ribbons, bagging garbage, throwing weight around, but all the time consenting to be held and yanked around on the shortest of short strings.  It takes a tough stomach to absorb such embarrassments in full public view.  The invitation that had the incentive of a great, big, powerful title, turned out to be nothing more than a hollowed-out goldmine long past its last pennyweight of metal.  Thus: invitation has turned out to be the trick and treat of Halloween; it is October, so there goes.  What was once seen and held as such a glittering incentive has now mutated into the gleaming steel bars of an office that is a jail.  The incentive of high office degraded to imprisonment.  There are those who can speak fluently, but only when Jagdeo allows them to, or he is not around, or doesn’t care how they make a spectacle of themselves.  It is an integral aspect of his secret self-satisfaction: good man, good choice, good job.

Take test case number two.  Where are the men and women of high ability, of singular prowess, who are in the former president’s inner circle?  When anyone can identify such a Guyanese (or any foreigner recruited for some nefarious duty), they know the address to which to send the memo.  There are no men and women of proven or unique ability around the chief policymaker.  Study them carefully, and what becomes apparent is that he is pleased to be surrounded by an assortment of mostly poolroom sharks, cardsharps, and down-to-their last-dollar characters.  Many of them have two common characteristics: they are weighed down by their baggage and driven to their knees by insatiable greed.  For cash.  For a place in the sun.  For some favour or two.  A beggar reduced to the impotency of a dependent cannot be a chooser.  Obedience is the word and the cost of Jagdeo’s gifts that he lavishes on them; after all, those are not coming out of his pocket, but from the purse of the public, so he could be generous.  Complete obedience is a pleasing start, but it still lacks a vital ingredient.  What the Big Man, who is now the king of Freedom House, and was once (and still is) the reigning monarch of State House, wants is the absolute of crawling on the belly, choking on their spittle, subservience.  As the towering Yankees striding over Guyana say, there is no free lunch.  No sirree!  Incidentally, that bit about swaggering Yankees is from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and it is free.

It is a hell of a long drop for those with advanced degrees, special training in words and numbers.  But there are those who would sell their soul for a scent of the intoxicating nectar of being close to power.  The Vice President knows that, and he gets them just where he wants them.  In the palm of his hand at his beck and call.  And under his heel, when he wants to suffocate them, or squish them, senseless to remind them who is the boss, and to whom they owe their continued existence in the good life.  When a man surrenders everything, so that he can collect some cheap trophies of arriving and standing, then the Guyanese Machiavelli has conquered again.  Welcome to my parlour, said the spider to the fly or the snake to the ready and willing prey.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)  

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• Big Boss’s, intoxicating, Jagdeo’s, parlour, Vice President Bharat Jagdeo

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