Shameless politics

Feb 08, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Last year I had cause to severely castigate Ravi Dev (a political relationship with whom I prefer not to have any longer) when he suggested that I cease my criticism of the PPP because my fulminations against the PPP Government can encourage gunmen to attack the State.

Mr. Dev was completely wrong. Not partially but completely wrong. Mr. Dev should ask himself why secret trials, rendition, permanent imprisonment without trial and torture of terrorist suspects have been abolished by President Obama days after he became President of the US.

The official explanation of the American Government is that “we are not like that; these are not American values.” But there is a hidden reason that no high American government official of the Obama Administration would admit and that reason is as strong as any other drive for ending these negative policies.

Such violations encourage attacks on the US. People will hate the US more ragingly when they see how terrible the US Government treats prisoners they capture. What is the relevance with Dev’s attack on me?

I do not know (or care to know) why Dev launched his confrontation on me but no fair-minded and reasonable Guyanese who is a dispassionate observer of the Jagdeo presidency would be that foolish enough to think that my criticism of the Jagdeo regime was so acerbic that it would have galvanized PPP haters to violently assault state institutions.

That thought was unnecessary when one looked around and saw the unconscionable, lawless, discriminatory, unconstitutional and vicious policies of the Government of Guyana that alienated strong constituencies that were eager to wage a battle against the State.

How I came in is something only Dev could explain. The PPP’s willingness to appear as an egregious Leviathan, devastating those in its midst that it either does not like or does not agree with, is more noticeable in this country than the perennial grass.

It doesn’t stop. It goes on. The latest was the dismissal of the striking air traffic controllers. They were reinstated but the fact remains that their service was officially terminated by Minister Benn. Benn’s authoritarianism was not the only type of arrogance on display.

The Stabroek News has reported President Jagdeo as saying at his Thursday press conference and I quote; “He (the President) later revealed that had the workers gone ahead and picket him when he arrived in the country yesterday (Thursday) they would have indeed been fired.”

Imagine a President of all countries like Guyana could make such a statement when this nation has been through that kind of authoritarian display before under Burnham. And we protested against such hubris and hateur by Burnham.

There was more to come from that press conference. Let me digress for a moment. The USAID has given UG’s journalism programme a few million dollars to help it. One desperately prays for the day when we would get journalists that respect and admire their profession.

But most of all that they act in such a way that we see them as competent professionals. President Jagdeo always opens up a gold mine for journalists at his press conferences but there are no takers He says the most inaccurate things. He says the most insulting things. He says the most arrogant things.
And there isn’t even a small response from our media practitioners.

Here is a perfect example. At that Thursday meeting with the media Mr. Jagdeo proposed four names for his choice to head the Integrity Commission. Even the most uninterested citizen would know that the Chairman of the Integrity Commission must be someone far, far, far removed from political parties and politics.

It is commonsense that the Chairman must be a person the entire country would see as an independent person. Yet Mr. Jagdeo had the temerity to name one of his close political colleagues who was a PPP election candidate in 2001 and 2006. What manner or what kind of leader is Mr. Jagdeo?

Does he not care about what he does to the integrity of the body politic of this nation? Mr. Jagdeo must know and has to know that the information passing through the hand of the Integrity Commission is so extremely sensitive that no citizen in their right mind would be mentally comfortable with a politician having access to such files.

Yet Mr. Jagdeo did not consider it an act of either political indecency or political shamelessness to suggest a PPP election candidate to head the Integrity Commission. I could understand Mr. Corbin’s silence. But the AFC and GAP by now should have taken Mr. Jagdeo over the coal for such a tribalist approach.
I wonder what Ravi Dev would say to that. Guyana remains a Shakespearian comedy.

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