Freddie Kissoon – Is the PPP trying to provoke ‘mo fyaah’?

Jun 11, 2008 Freddie Kissoon

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Quite a few things from the Jagdeo presidency are not making sense in the context of the traditional fragility of Guyana’s political structure. Guyana has not had any sustained period of political stability. We know what happened to the Jagan Government in the sixties so no need to dwell on that. Forbes Burnham looked invincible.

From 1964 to about 1972, there were no really threatening challenges to Burnham. The spilt with the United Force did not even cause ripples. The Rupununi Uprising was quickly put down. Burnham endured the criticism of the 1968 rigged elections.

From the time of the nationalization of the Bauxite industry until the PNC went out of power in 1992, one cannot say Guyana was a stable polity. The PPP used the sugar workers to hunt down Mr. Burnham. They burnt cane fields, they sabotaged the industry and they undermined agriculture. They even attacked the Corentyne toll stations killing a policeman in the process.

The economy was not immune from these quasi-guerrilla manoeuvres. From 1974 until his death, Walter Rodney became the nemesis of Mr. Burnham. When Hoyte took over in 1985, things were less torrid but more pressure built up on Hoyte to hold transparent elections.

Political stability did not return with free and fair elections. Cheddi Jagan escaped tempestuous confrontations but the tempo reached boiling point when Mrs. Jagan became President. The violence was non-stop. In July 1999, Mrs. Jagan’s Government was close to collapse after the public sector workers went on strike and the state buckled under the pressure.

Many companies that depended on import and export had approached the Public Service Union directly to negotiate some form of accommodation on the wharves. One Minister, “Sash” Sawh, told me that his friends in Canada were under the impression that the Government would have fallen.

The constant bombardment took its toll on Mrs. Jagan’s health and she anointed Bharrat Jagdeo as President, a position he came to extend because Moses Nagamootoo and Ralph Ramkarran refused to concede ground to each other. Mr. Jagdeo squeaked in because of an error of judgement on the part of these two PPP stalwarts who both deserved the presidency in front of Mr. Jagdeo.

Looking back at the Janet Jagan presidency a paradox characterized it. Historically, Mrs. Jagan earned the presidency as any other PPP cadre.

But the irony was that Mrs. Jagan was the most inflexible of all PPP leaders and the most committed to a communist blueprint.

In a strange way, the PNC under Mr. Hoyte, did Guyana a great service when it pressured Mrs. Jagan’s presidency out of existence. Had Mrs. Jagan continued in office, my deeply held belief was that she would have followed Burnham in identical fashion. She would have openly communized the functions of government with its attendant authoritarian features.

We still have those motifs with Mr. Jagdeo but Mrs. Jagan perhaps would have been more brazen in her communist policies.

The tenure of Mr. Jagdeo saw one of the most violent moments in Guyanese history outside of the sixties. It was in the aftermath of the 2001 elections; Regent Street looked like it would have burnt to the ground.

CARICOM intervened and Mr. Jagdeo survived. Since then, Mr. Jagdeo’s presidency has been a victim of relentless pursuit. The Lusignan mini-holocaust egregiously stands out as a pathological aberration in the history of this country exceeding any atrocity that occurred in Mackenzie in the sixties.

So the point is that we have never had long intervals of political tranquility. In the midst of this morbid suspension why does the Government of Guyana persist with its barefaced authoritarian display? It is virtually non-stop.

The list is long. Some of these autocratic decisions are so frightening that they cause most people to wonder if Guyana will explode. The latest act of authoritarian shamelessness is the firing of nine CANU officials, including its head, because they failed the polygraph examination. My opinion is that the dismissals are illegal.

Why is the Government behaving like this? My feeling is that the Government wants to obfuscate the details that would come out of Roger Khan’s trial. In addition, nothing is going good for the Jagdeo presidency – food prices nightmare, gasoline nightmare, electricity nightmare.

The government is moving from one outlandish act of dictatorship to another in the hope that these unjust policies will provoke “mo fyaah.” It can then tell its supporters and the world that the PNC is up to its old tricks – that the PNC will stop at nothing to overthrow the PPP.
There may be other explanations but if they are I would like to see an assessment as to why the Jagdeo presidency is rapidly descending into whole-scale dictatorship.

My conclusion is that the Government is looking for a way out of the mess it is in and wants to engender a huge catastrophe. Guyana will lose, of course, if that happens. Guyana always loses.

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