Sex meets politics: The death of an apology

May 27, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The desire of a majority of Guyanese after the PNC lost power in 1992 was that the PNC should own up to some of its terrible violations, apologise to the nation and let the country move on in search of final unity of its divided people.
Only one person from the inner chambers of the PNC’s leadership acknowledged that as a party, the PNC should offer the apology. That was Raphael Trotman. The PNC never did. Time moved on. The PPP got older in power. As the PPP consolidated its hold on the state machinery and the wider public sector, eerie policies, macabre happenings, harsh violations, and immoral conduct began to demolish the edifice of the PPP.
The nasty side of PNC rule was centered on the person, Forbes Burnham, himself. The authoritarian drift of Burnham can be dated from 1970 even though some analysts would say it began in 1968 when the national election of that year was rigged. There is a school of thought that says the absence of competitive elections does not necessarily bring about dictatorship.
One group of people that embrace that philosophy is the PPP. All of the members of its inner circle in the past forty years do not accept Cuba as a dictatorship and that the absence of free elections in Cuba has not caused the loss of freedom. In the final year of her life, Mrs. Jagan’s Mirror columns carried eulogistic articles on Cuba.
So for the sake of simplicity, we can date Burnham’s descent into oligarchy around the beginning of the seventies. He died in 1985.
Again for the sake of simplicity, we can enumerate his years of unsavoury rule as being 13 – from 1972 -1985. From 1986, President Hoyte began to move in the direction of perestroika and glasnost.
If the PNC is to apologize for autocratic highhandedness and tragic violations contained in thirteen years of bad governance, could one say that the sixteen years of the PPP’s control have been equally perverted? The evidence seems to be in support of that thesis.
This writer has spoken to some of the bravest and most famous of the names from the WPA, Christian Churches, business community, human rights organizations, NGOs, the media fraternity, trade union movement that were the main forces that confronted the Burnham regime, and they tell me today that they think that the PPP Government at the moment is worse than the PNC under Burnham.
It is such a pity that I cannot identify some of these great Guyanese. But it would shock readers to know that these people are serious about their condemnation of the PPP because they courageously fought Burnham.
Today their psychology is burdened with what Guyana has turned out to be. Any reader of my column would know that I count myself among this group.
Vincent Alexander takes an interesting angle on the apology question. He feels both parties should state their regrets. Alexander opines that when one talks about Burnham’s excesses one has to contextualize the time of Burnham’s reign and the nature of the beast he was up against.
He cites the attitudinal transformation of the WPA. He intoned that the greatest force that squared off against the Burnham Government was the WPA. He went on to say that the WPA now realizes the nature of the beast (his word) that Burnham had to contend with because the WPA itself now has to deal with that beast.
The apology obligation of the PNC has died a natural death. There is no way you can look thousands of Guyanese in the eyes and tell them that you think their party, the PNC, should apologise for bad things it did when it was in power. I saw that frame of mind during the May Day rally this month.
You can get into trouble telling that to people when you hear what they express to you about the nature of the PPP’s governance.
The brutal fact is that there are more perverted, nasty, dirty scandals during sixteen years of the PPP domination than those thirteen years of Burnham’s. The moments of immoralities are horrible and the PPP has two more years to go. The Jagdeo regimes just keep going from scandal to scandal that are incomparable in the Caribbean context. The latest is Fidelity.
Would Burnham have tolerated the pathological heights of corruption as we see evolving right before our eyes? Burnham had his autocratic side but in all fairness to him, he would have dealt severely with his Ministers, subordinates, underlings and party officials who were engaged in sexual misconduct.
The apology that should have come in 1992, we will never ever see.

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Sex meets politics: The death of an apology

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