The Freddie Kissoon column – PRESIDENT JAGDEO’S PEOPLE

Jul 07, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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President Jagdeo was quoted in the media last week as saying that Guyana would not sign the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) before he consults with the Guyanese people. It was not clear how that was possible seeing the EPA was negotiated within a holistic framework, meaning it was a Caricom affair.

That does not preclude the Guyana Government from opting out. Both the European Union and the Caribbean Community have not done away with the right of individual units to reject decisions that the collective body make.

There seems to be a changing situation after the Caricom Heads agreed last week to formally endorse the implementation of the EPA.

Mr. Jagdeo sounds resigned. It looks like Guyana will join the rest of Caricom and ink the pact. Mr. Jagdeo is quoted again in the press, at the conclusion of the Heads’ meeting of asserting his right to consult the Guyanese people.

He said; “I am not going to give up fighting and I want my people to know exactly what we are entering into.”

If Mr. Jagdeo decides to hold intense sessions with Guyanese stakeholders on the disadvantages Caricom faces by accepting the EPA, it my well end up as a huge embarrassment for Mr. Jagdeo. Let us envisage the unfolding scenario.

Mr. Jagdeo calls up the Rice Producers’ Association and FITUG. It will be easy pickings. They will denounce the EPA. The Private Sector will not be that easily pliable. It is doubtful they will openly embrace an anti-EPA position because Mr. Jagdeo told them to.

The Private Sector Commission as distinct from the Guyana Manufacturing Association and the Chamber of Commerce will not be inclined to pursue stakeholder politics with the Office of the President given what the outgoing President, Michael Correira revealed. In his farewell address, Mr. Correia indicated that his organization had urged Mr. Jagdeo to give life to a stakeholder forum.

It was accepted but never implemented. It is clear from his feeling about the EPA, Mr. Jagdeo wants a consultancy forum where his views and his exposure of the EPA will be accepted by the wider society.

The President may not receive an inviting reception from the combined parliamentary opposition, the non-parliamentary opposition like the WPA, NGOs like Red Thread, the TUC, the Mayor and City Councilors, the private media and maybe the Guyana Council of Churches.

It is absolutely simple to predict what would the shape of the meetings. The first question to be asked of the President is why is the EPA the only avenue that motivates him to want to have a meeting of minds with other sections of the Guyanese society?

What about other similar pressing developments? Is there an ongoing consultancy about crime? Surely, no Guyanese can be brave enough to opine that the EPA is a more exigent item on the national agenda than crime.

Are the opposition parties constantly being kept informed of anti-crime policies? Were they contacted about the polygraph intention and its implementation?

Things are not looking good for consulting at the moment given the opposition doubts about the official version of what happened at Lindo Creek.

The EPA awakening of the President may be heading for an ignominious collapse before it even began. What happened to the consensus that was forged after the Lusignan mini-Holocaust and the Bartica Massacre?

It evaporated in an acrimonious exchange in Parliament when the PNC, GAP and AFC were denied their amendments to a motion on that consensus.

In all honesty, what can the President say if at his EPA confabulation with these particular stakeholders he is asked about the need to end the radio monopoly, pass a Freedom of Information Act, implement the Guyana Human Rights Commission, lay the Sanata Divestment document in Parliament, reconstitute the Ethnic Relations Commission to reflect a non-partisan content, dissolve the Integrity Commission and bring an independent one into being among other contentious issues? One suspects that there will be one of two responses from the President.

He will agree to these demands and concede their early existence. In that case, the opposition will say that they have been that way before.

They will request immediate action rather than accept promises which they are uncertain about.
Secondly, he will say that those urgencies could be discussed at a later forum but for now the emphasis is on the EPA. The opposition will then say that the forum is not for what you want to talk about only.

The Caricom Summit is over, President Jagdeo is back in Guyana, and between now and next month when the EPA will be made into law, the President will be talking to “his people” about the severe disadvantages inherent in the EPA. But exactly who are the President’s people?

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