Latest update January 30th, 2025 6:10 AM
May 30, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
In last Sunday’s Kaieteur News, I published a letter in response to Ms. Gitanjali Persaud’s observations about democratic centralism and other negative manifestations in the PPP. Ms. Persaud’s missive, featured in the Stabroek News, is a wonderful viewpoint. One hopes that she keeps writing.
The refreshing dimension of Ms. Persaud’s correspondence (I know she is a real person) is that she sets out to praise Mrs. Jagan, sees a good legacy left by Mrs. Janet but was courageous enough to enumerate the dangerous pitfalls in the long history of the PPP.
Such writings pose enormous difficulties for the PPP because they do not come from their detractors but from Guyanese who have a positive conceptualisation of Dr. and Mrs. Jagan but see the existence of so many danger signals in the PPP.
The trouble with the PPP is that it cannot respond to the mountain of criticism of its failed policies over the decades it has been in existence. And this is what is so troubling for this nation, in that you have a party that keeps winning elections, but is guilty of so many shameful sins and persistent shameful conduct.
It never wins the election on its intellectual strengths, but on the basis of whipped up emotions on the part of one section of Guyana’s population.
Ms. Persaud makes an absorbing point. She wrote in her letter that she longs for the day when you can see two PPP presidential candidates squaring off for the title. That will never happen in the PPP. It occurred in the PNC. It will happen again in the PNC in August. Yet the people who vote for the PPP cannot see that their ballots will not bring progress in Guyana because they are voting for a party that lacks an appreciation for the fulcrums on which freedom rest or to put it another way, a party that has no respect for the essential substance of freedom.
Voters should ask themselves, if a political party cannot accept that its leaders should openly present their credentials to their fellow citizens in the pursuit of their ambition to be president of the country, then by what logic can the man/woman who becomes president (from that party) bring freedom to his/her people?
Surely voters must see that they will be electing a person whose qualities his/her party chose not to display along with his/her contenders. The really exasperating thing about those whose electoral preference is the PPP, is that the PPP is so barefaced in not responding to the criticism of people like Ms. Persaud yet they go on ballot day and empower this party to govern Guyana.
Why can’t they tell us why the route of open competition is not an option for the presidential slot in 2011? Morally, the PPP has an obligation to do so. You may not agree with their explanation but at least you expect an explanation.
Take Dr. Jagan. If a researcher collects all the rebuttals and responses to condemnations of Dr. Jagan contained in all the newspapers, magazines etc. published in this country over the past decades, the researcher will not find specific details of each critique. The protégés of Dr. and Mrs. Jagan have never, I repeat, never confronted you head on about the particular facts you highlighted about Dr. Jagan’s mistakes.
The replies are all the same. They follow the same pattern. They go like this “These people do not like Comrade Cheddi because of their own selfishness.” Critics of the PPP are trying to get back at Comrade Cheddi for personal reasons.” They hate Comrade Cheddi because he stood in the way of the parties they were rooting for”. The PPP detractors cannot defeat the legacy of Comrade Cheddi because the world recognises him as father of the nation.” “Comrade Cheddi was a great leader who has been proven right by history.”
Pick up the Mirror newspaper tomorrow and you will see the same old tunes above being churned out. Never is there a specific counter-argument of particular situations where Dr. Jagan’s weakness was fully exposed. So we will never hear why Jagan supported Castro’s abolition of free elections.
The protégés will not tell why it was wrong for the Americans to destabilize Dr. Jagan’s Government in the sixties but that it was right for the PPP to support Soviet invasions around the world. No one in the PPP is ever going to talk about the account of Halim Majeed in his book where he detailed factually the PPP/PNC joint slate for the 1985 elections.
If you are waiting to hear or read the PPP’s explanations as to why Comrade Cheddi did all these things, you will wait in vain.
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