A patriotic appeal to Mrs. Nadira Jagan-Brancier

May 03, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Jagan, Nadira, who lives in Canada, is still in Guyana attending to matters relating to her mother’s death. Last week, she commissioned her parents’ home as a heritage building. Unlike her brother, Joey, Nadira has refrained from making pronouncements on the rule of the party her parents founded almost sixty years ago. But she must have spoken over the years to her brother as to why he left the party of his parents and founded a party opposed to the PPP.

Mrs. Jagan-Brancier must know what the environment looks like in the country she lives and how it appears compared to Georgetown. And that thought must have entered her head when she heard her brother bemoan the appalling nastiness of the Camp Street seawall that her parents loved to visit. Her brother’s comments were vocalised during his speech at a memorial service for Mrs. Jagan at Freedom House two nights after she died. Mrs. Jagan-Brancier must have wondered why Georgetown could be so putrid when her mother’s party has been ruling Guyana since 1992, therefore what have they been doing with sixteen years of power and billions of American dollars in aid. I hope she did.

I have been told that Mrs. Jagan-Brancier leaves Guyana in a few days time to return to her home in Canada. Before she goes, I would appeal to her to confront the people in her parents’ party to stop the horrible moral degeneracy that characterizes the exercise of power by the PPP in Guyana today.
I am fully aware that Mrs. Jagan-Brancier has no legal authority in the PPP to demand changes because she may not even be a member of her parents’ party.

But as the child of the two persons who formed the party and preserved it for over sixty years, at least Mrs. Jagan-Brancier possesses the moral authority to demand that the inheritors of her parents’ organisation rule in the interests of all Guyanese.
I believe Mrs. Jagan-Brancier would not have chosen Canada to live and have her children brought up as Canadian citizens if Canada was a dictatorship where corruption and racial discrimination were the most visible signs of politics in that nation.

The one moral point Mrs. Jagan-Brancier has in her favour is that the deeper the PPP regime sinks into the cesspool of theft, moral misconduct, dictatorial policies, racial discrimination and unbelievable incompetence, the more it damages the image and credibility of her parents.
I appeal to Mrs. Jagan-Brancier to see the undeniable connection between corruption and dictatorship in the rule of the PPP and the blemish they bring to the legacy of her parents.

Let me say this to you, Mrs. Jagan-Brancier, I have penned an enormous number of analytical commentary on the politics of your parents but in those voluminous outpourings, you can never find a single line of an accusation of corruption.
I know both Cheddi and Janet Jagan were not and have never been corrupt politicians whereby they took public money and converted it for personal aggrandizement. I know of two instances where Mrs. Jagan almost suffered a fit when she was given the evidence of corruption by two PPP cadres that she nurtured over the decades and to whom she was extremely close.

I would suggest to you Madam, that even if you cannot get the PPP leaders particularly, Mr. Jagdeo, to walk away from the destructive agenda they have embraced and which sooner than later will see tragic episodes in this land, that you at least pen a public statement on the glaring and graphic picture of moral turpitude that surrounds the leadership of the PPP.
It is there for all Guyanese to see. I ask you directly Mrs. Jagan-Brancier if you know of any past Canadian Prime Minister who enjoys the luxury that after his prime ministership was over, that Mr. Jagdeo will have after his Presidency is over.

Today, in Guyana, the memories of the Burnham dictatorship have faded. No decent, fair-minded Guyanese who lived under the presidency of Forbes Burnham and who endured the political and economic morass of that age believes that the Burnham dictatorship remains the worst feature of bad rule in the Caribbean.
That terrible stigma has now been happily claimed by the people who inherited your parents’ party.

These people have chalked up the record of being the worst leaders in the history of the English-speaking Caribbean. I appeal to you, Mrs. Jagan-Brancier that before you re-enter the democratic soil of Canada, one of the world’s enduring democracies, you at least display the moral courage to part company with those who have destroyed all the decent values you see in your dead parents.