2008 began and ended with a Hitchcockian mystery

Jan 03, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

We got four hours of blackout where I live on New Year’s morning. Sign of things to come. Let’s move on. It remains a mystery but its consequences generated wide debate last year. Why did President Jagdeo dismiss one of the longest serving members of the PPP – Joseph O’Lall as 2008 began?
O’Lall died of a heart attack shortly after (no doubt brought on by the strain of the dismissal and from what he told me was the incredible unwillingness of every leading member of the PPP hierarchy to help him)
I had a long chat with O’Lall before he died, and two columns carried sections of that interview.
It would have been a psychologist’s most cherished prize to have listened to O’Lall speaking. Almost overtaken by mental anguish as he described the hurt he felt at being unfairly fired by President Jagdeo and having being abandoned by the PPP, I stood in mental confusion as he described his love for the PPP, extolled the virtues of the PPP and hoped that the PPP returned to its humane base.
Not for a moment could this man see that the party he so loved had become what it always was—fascist, and that it had crossed the line that separated civilised political behaviour from lawless, criminalised conduct. Talking to O’Lall, I saw with graphic vision how the German people encouraged Adolf Hitler to become a monster and when he became that Frankenstein, they cheered him on.
Was he telling me the truth when he opined that President Jagdeo was worse than Forbes Burnham? Was he telling me the truth when he said that Mrs. Jagan had become a politically uncaring person from the great lady he knew from the sixties?
Was he telling me the truth when he stated that he believed he was ostracised by the entire PPP leadership and the entire Government of Guyana because he went too far in having certain citizens arrested for accusation of illegal dealings? According to O’Lall, he had stepped on the friends of his comrades.
Joseph O’Lall was incapable of understanding the contradictions that came from his mouth.
He held to the unshakeable belief that the PPP was a great party but in the same breath, he sat on his sofa and outlined for me a party that had lost touch with humanity, reality and human decency.
Joseph O’Lall is dead and gone but the controversy his ousting from his job at the Guyana Energy Agency generated has exposed the Machiavellian nature of the PPP and the dangerous theoretical invalidity in the relationship between ruling party and the President of Guyana.
According to O’Lall no one from the PPP could have dared question the President on why he chose to fire him without giving him, O’Lall, an explanation.
These two decisions set the stage for the deepening of authoritarian governorship in 2008.
Indeed, 2008 was one of the poorest political years in recent memory. We could look back at sports, culture, the communication industry and the construction business and conclude that in these areas 2008 was positive. But within political culture, there was further descent into the chasm of nasty rule.
We stood helplessly and watched this march towards the pathways that Forbes Burnham once walked. And as the relentless habits of evil power claims even more victims as this new year marches on, one wonders if a breaking point is going to come in 2009.
Elected dictatorship claimed the lives of O’Lall and David De Caires, both died of heart failure.
Both died because the heart for their age could not stand the extreme frustration and deep disappointment that destroyed their mental strength. For O’Lall, it was a shock to know that after fifty years of service, he could be mistreated due to no accusation of wrongdoing but the whims and fancy of one man.
Even if David De Caires could have understood the rebirth of the Burnhamite dictatorship, he certainly couldn’t anticipate how its creeping tentacles would have sought to destroy his prized possession – an independent paper that played a monumental role in the return to free and fair election.
De Caires lived an agonizing life as his paper struggled to survive the Freudian legacy of hatred for the free press that Cheddi Jagan left his protégés.
On reflecting on the tragic death of David De Caires, one wonders if Ras Tom Dalgetty was right when he said we should have tried to make Burnham mellow rather than overthrow him.
We undid him and look what we ended up with. 2008 closed off with the pardon of Philip Bynoe. Strangely, Mr. Bynoe was openly and freely walking around before President Jagdeo’s generosity visited him.

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2008 began and ended with a Hitchcockian mystery

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