100 million dollars to elect a dictator

Dec 17, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Quite often, and I mean quite often, people with wide acquaintance and ongoing familiarity with the PPP would tell me that the party leaders cannot tell President Jagdeo what to do and have no leverage over the presidency. I refer not only to businessmen, and senior government officials but also party insiders.
Last week, I met a senior PPP functionary who admitted to me that most of the key players at Freedom House do not find a senior public functionary, placed in his position by the Office of the President, to be someone who helps the credibility and public image of the PPP.
He told me that the complaints from all sectors of society about this guy’s deportment keep growing but the PPP as a party, even tough it is the ruling party, cannot do anything either in terms of dismissal or demotion of this functionary. I had a little encounter with this person at the launching of the Guyana Times.
I was with two of my Kaieteur News colleagues and he invaded the conversation. He told the two Kaieteur News journalists, he would like to talk to them outside of my presence because he knows “Freddie Kissoon will distort what he has to say.” There was no request for an excuse; there was no display of a mannerly approach.
The story of the PPP being cast out of the policy-making machinery by the Office of the President can be heard all over this country. As recent as last Sunday, the Stabroek News editorial opined that Mr. Jagdeo has managed to free himself of the party’s arena of action.
Constitutionally, unlike the Westminster system, the American and Guyanese presidency cannot be recalled by their respective parties. There is no such law. In the Westminster system, it is different as we know in the famous case where a sitting Prime Minister lost the embrace of her party and was forced out of office.
Mrs. Thatcher had no option but to resign. In the parliamentary system, a vote of no confidence topples the government as what happened to Basdeo Panday when he was Prime Minister of Trinidad.
In the US, the President cannot be removed by his party but if he diverges from the quintessence of his party’s manifesto then if he wants to run for a second term, his chances are virtually dead. To run for the Presidency of the US, you have to get your party’s imprimatur. Your party holds a primary system that allows you to receive the party’s nomination. No candidate will get the presidential slot if his/her conceptualizations are opposed to his/her party’s system of beliefs.
It is doubtful Mr. Mc Cain would have gone that far if he had supported abortion.
In Guyana, there is mounting confusion about the relationship between the Office of the President and the nerve centre of the ruling party on Robb Street. From all that I have heard, I am convinced that there is a schism between Robb Street and New Garden Street. There is nothing in the laws of Guyana to allow the PPP to recall Mr. Jagdeo. So one can imagine that it has to either try to persuade Mr. Jagdeo or wait for his tenure to end. The question is not what the PPP can do at this moment. The pertinent point is why spend hundreds of millions of dollars to elect a president over whom the party has no control.
I was told that the PPP at the last general election spent about a hundred million dollars.
In which system, you have a ruling party that wins the government and its chief person at the helm of the government has a different direction?
Let us take two issues. Mrs. Jagan publicly rejected the withdrawal of state advertisements from the Stabroeks News. She publicly called for the retirement age to go to sixty five. Mrs. Jagan is the most enduring vote-getter at party congresses and someone of immense stature in the PPP’s leadership. Why then were the state placements only restored one year after her lamentation?
It meant one of three things. She did not ask her party to make the reversal a policy of the government or she put it to her party and she failed or her party accepted her position, asked that the reversal be implemented but the Office of the President rejected it.
We are coming close another general election. Maybe hundreds of millions will be spent. But to elect whom – the party or the person it assigns the presidential slot to? It will be interesting to see how the party supporters and our journalists deal with this enigma as 2011 dawns.

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100 million dollars to elect a dictator

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