Brilliant minds in Burnham’s Cabinet yielded nothing

Mar 23, 2012 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
I always find Freddie Kissoon’s analyses interesting, although I do not always agree with them. His piece “Ramnarine’s ramenta; Rohee’s rohrsbordun” (KN, March 21, 2012) plays a familiar theme percolating in a few of Kissoon’s prior pieces comparing Cheddi Jagan to Forbes Burnham. Kissoon singles out for illustration the case of Clement Rohee’s presence in Cheddi Jagan’s Cabinet and his absurd 19-year tenure as a PPP minister.
Both Kissoon and I are in agreement that Clement Rohee is incompetent. Kissoon adumbrates that Rohee lacks incipient brilliance, a known fact and a commonality that surfs the DNA of the protégés of the Jagans, Jagdeo and Ramotar. Recent proof of this has been furnished with the new Ramotar Cabinet.
Kissoon states that the Jagans’ communist ideological conformism lends itself to a derelict degradation of aesthetics and epistemology, meaning that any Tom, Dick and Harry with half a brain is deemed, by the rabid communists the Jagans were, as capable of holding any position, and even those that require exceptional acumen and the ability to make decisions under pressure and with a comprehensive and often expedited demonstration of tact and knowledge.
Kissoon leaves his analysis incomplete. He fails to conclude that despite the abundance of prime intellects under Burnham, Guyana was wrecked and the PNC failed miserably. That failure is a stark reminder that this is not about ideology and the selection of manpower based on ideological fermentation. This is about the failed political systems and parties that choose these brilliant minds or cursed intellects and the leaders who lord over those systems and parties.
Winston Churchill, Horatio Nelson, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow would have failed under the PNC of Burnham and the PPP of Cheddi Jagan. As long as any system stifles innovation, dominates naturally dominant and superior intellects, makes bright people fools and mendicants and asks Mensa minds to obey wrongdoing and idiocy while submerging their morality, those fine intellects inevitably become the wasteland of a razed political landscape.
It does not matter that Burnham picked rocket scientists while Jagan picked semi-literates. It would not have mattered if Burnham picked semi-literates and Jagan picked geniuses, the end result would have been the same. Atop the pyramid were two leaders who, despite their anti-West and anti-colonial rhetoric, were just as colonial and suppressive as those they condemned. Brilliant minds serving dishonoured political codes cannot yield anything. They are as caged birds as those without independence of mind and levity of intellect who walked into those cages.
Cheddi Jagan led by his wife, Janet Jagan, the true rabid communist in the family and the prime reason for many of his brazen blunders as leader, borrowed a foreign ideology and wanted to unthinkingly ram it down the throats of a Guyanese and moreso Indian population that was never enamoured with communism and that would have suffered dramatic economic losses under communism.
I cannot see how Jagan would have ruled Guyana any differently from Burnham and how the results would have been different if it was Jagan’s communism as opposed to Burnham’s socialism. Indians would have punished under 28 years of Jagan’s communism as they did under 28 years of Burnham’s socialism.
Cheddi Jagan allowed Janet Jagan to egregiously push him in a direction that saw blind adherence to ideology cloud his bond to and understanding of his own people and their needs. Forbes Burnham on the other hand was fixated on personal power at all costs and had no issues sacrificing an entire nation in that quest. When he gained power, he, like Jagan, pursued ideology and flushed Guyana down the toilet in the process.
For all his philosophical comprehension of politics and his magnificent brain, Forbes Burnham failed miserably, punished his people and tormented later generations with the yoke of disgracing poverty. Jagan continued upon assuming power and his lackeys have taken the pillage of the people to even greater heights.
The great minds Burnham and Jagan selected to cronyism similarly failed. The inerudite following Jagan and Burnham also failed. Jagan failed. Burnham failed. Clement Rohee is Cheddi Jagan’s legacy and his failures are nothing but a valid representation of what his leader saddled this nation with when he departed.
There is one area in which Burnham outclassed the Jagans and demonstrated not only the supremacy of his intellect but his ability to step outside ideology and the possible willingness to seemingly atone for his transgressions; the appointment of Desmond Hoyte. I will deal with this in a separate letter.
M. Maxwell

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