Latest update May 22nd, 2026 12:38 AM
THE GREATEST HERO
Today marks yet another anniversary of the PPP’s 1992 victory that restored democracy to Guyana. There are likely to be many more such anniversaries because the PPP has proven itself, despite its many shortcomings and despite the clear abuses that have taken place in recent years, to be the party with the best record of managing this country.
October 5, 1992, will always be remembered as the day that history vindicated Cheddi Jagan. It marked his return to power after twenty-eight painstaking years in opposition.
It took remarkable character for Cheddi to have endured for so long and to have waited and to have struggled all those years.
I have been reading a great deal of the revisionist literature that is coming out, which is painting Cheddi as a failure.
Nothing could be more a distortion of the truth. Cheddi Jagan is far more heroic than most Guyanese, far more because he stood the test of time and never wilted under the pressure to denounce and disavow what he believed in. He stood by his principles and did not sell his soul. For that alone he deserves the greatest respect.
I have seen a lot of people writing a lot of trite, a great many flawed analyses about the naivety of Cheddi Jagan and how things could have been different had Cheddi not antagonized the West; that he would not have lost power.
Those who are making these ill-informed analyses are not suggesting that he should have been more tactful; they are suggesting that he should have become an opportunist and hid his convictions. No man worth his salt is going to deny his convictions and Cheddi was no opportunist.
Yet another series of criticisms seems to suggest that he should have been more frontal and aggressive with Burnham. Those who make these claims need to go back and study history.
Cheddi Jagan and the PPP were active in the struggle against Burnham but like all Marxists, including the paper revolutionaries which led the Maurice Bishop revolution to implosion, Cheddi understood the nature of social change and the process of contradictions that ultimately had to reach their climax.
There are others who are suggesting that a great many people broke with Cheddi because they did not agree with his politics and felt he was disillusioned. I agree.
They were a great many persons like that who lacked the vision and understanding that Cheddi possessed, who lacked the staying power, who did not understand the slow but constant march of history.
I have noted one commentator in this newspaper, who is becoming increasingly disoriented in his analysis, claim that Martin Carter confessed his disillusionment with Cheddi.
I am not certain that commentator had any discussion at all with Carter who he now sees as a hero but whom he once described as a drunkard.
There were a lot of people who could not wait with Cheddi; could not afford to wait on the contradictions to reach their climax.
There are a lot of persons who bear a certain shame which they keep hidden and seek to justify with all manner of pretexts. That shame was their lack of staying power. They gave in, left Cheddi and went with Burnham.
Not all of them went because they were fooled by his sweet tongue. Some of them went because they needed the money.
Some of them went because they had families to take care of; they preferred to prostitute themselves rather than have their families starve.
I therefore do not judge harshly those who betrayed Cheddi. There were always reasons for them abandoning him, some justifiable and others not.
Cheddi Jagan never gave up the struggle. He never did stop fighting. He was a remarkable human being who took the indignities heaped upon him and never held it against anyone.
He was almost in this respect like a living prophet. It takes a special human being to be able not to hold malice, especially considering what he had to endure.
Cheddi Jagan never gave up the struggle, neither did he ever give in to the pressures. Mistakes may have been made; this is inevitable. He is being judged, for example, to have been naïve to have allowed the British to choose the electoral system.
Cheddi knew, however, that if he had left that conference without a firm commitment on Independence, then Guyana’s freedom would have been delayed. He did the selfless thing because he knew what mattered most was Independence for Guyana.
Today we should remember Cheddi and his long fight. He is the greatest hero this country has ever produced.
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