THE FREDDIE KISSOON COLUMN – CANU has been canoed

Jun 29, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Two weeks ago I read an article in the Mirror by Mrs. Jagan. She wrote that she supports Barack Obama for the presidency. She went on to state her expectations of Mr. Obama. Her main wish is that he transforms the nature of American power and makes it more democratic.

On reading Mrs. Jagan’s essay on Obama, I thought of the need for our politicians to transcend of our own narrow, sordid political culture and replace it with what Mrs. Jagan is looking forward to from Obama.

Obviously my mind went to Mrs. Jagan’s party that has been in power for sixteen years. Yet that long period has not produced a Barack Obama. The PPP control today is like the PNC in government – obsession with power and the pursuit of hegemony over state and society.

The inescapable conclusion on reading Mrs. Jagan was that her party has failed to do for Guyana what she wants Barack Obama to do for the US. It is not that the sixteen years of PPP rule has made deep and extensive dents into the ancient way ruling politicians use power.

On the contrary, the venalities and perversities that characterize the use of power in the seventies and eighties have been preserved. More seriously, political and cultural regressions have taken place under the PPP.

If one dispassionately analyzes the rule of the PPP, one sees horribly identical functions of state institutions during Forbes Burnham’s governorship. The PPP has produced absolutely no superior trait in the administering of the territory of Guyana. The fascistization of the state as it appeared under Burnham remains intact.

Perhaps the cancer that has devoured the social and political integrity of power in Guyana is the politicization of the public sector. Cheddi Jagan believed in it and he instilled that approach into his protégés. Burnham accepted it as common sense in the maintenance of power and it runs through the political cloth of the PNC leadership.

Yesterday under Burnham and today under the PPP, public institutions are saturated with party politics. It is anti-developmental. It alienates the entire society. Under Burnham, PNC mandarins became Permanent Secretaries, undermining in the process the priceless British concept of the neutral civil servant. This paramountcy of the party concept began under Cheddi Jagan when he was Premier.

He took a PPP teacher from Queen’s College and made him his PS. When asked to account for his break with tradition, he simply intoned that he believed a PS should be partial to the government of the day. Today, four members of the PPP central committee are Permanent Secretaries.

As I looked at President Jagdeo on television making the unbelievable announcement that the replacements for the nine CANU personnel fired for polygraph failure will not be tested upon entry, I thought of Mrs. Jagan’s endorsement of Obama. I said to myself, why does she not insist that her party democratize power just as she wants Obama to do.

I had alluded in a previous article to the conspiracy in which the CANU head may have been fired to make way for a more malleable employee. I believe I am right. The new nine persons may be of a certain political persuasion. It is the life story of this tragic nation.

Can a government anywhere else in the world get more absurd in its use of power than what we have seen with the firing of the CANU nine?

The government administered the polygraph to CANU operatives and nine failed muster. You then replace them with personnel who will not be tested upon successful application.

President Jagdeo said that they will be examined at a later stage, the reasoning being that the polygraphs were rented from abroad and have gone back. Somewhere down the line the firm will be hired again. The President was actually saying that the rent of the polygraph was specifically intended for CANU. But why CANU alone? Why when the polygraphs were here they were not administered to the security forces and the GRA employees? CANU deals with narcotics curtailment. The security forces deal with that and much more.

For example, if CANU makes an arrest, that person has to pass through a system that is operated by other members of the security apparatus apart from CANU officials. One suspects that CANU was specifically targeted because the Office of the President wants its own people in CANU. The ruling elites may be comfortable with the headship of the army and police and CANU was the odd man out.

I will ask readers to remember this article when the replacements are announced and the media does its checking. I have done more than two thousand columns since 1988 and I have not been incorrect, not once, about the wrong things the PPP Government has done since 1992.

I hope Mrs. Jagan realizes we are in desperate need in Guyana for a Barack Obama. 

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