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President Jagdeo does it again

Jul 07, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

When left on their own, without advisors in the room, leaders can say very damaging and self-destructive things. I do like Vice-President Biden but I think he must have embarrassed President Obama when he asserted that if Israel strikes at Iran to take out its nuclear programme that would be Israel’s business which as a sovereign nation, the US cannot dictate to.
This Biden peccadillo hardly needs debate. Biden was speaking to an interviewer and didn’t have the facility of the presence of advisors.
Many leaders do not take advice. This was an unexpected and surprising difference between Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan. If you look at the style of the two men, you would think that the flamboyance and erudition of Burnham would make him out to be a pompous leader who thought he knows it all. Jagan was less intellectually endowed and came across as a solitary figure that was willing to listen. But it was Burnham who was most inclined to act on advice.
I have been told this by people who had and have no fondness for Burnham and people whose judgement I trust implicitly.
Also many objective authors have written about this weakness of Jagan (see the Lloyd Best interview in Frank Birbalsingh, “The PPP of Guyana, 1950-1992: An Oral History.”
Best was the UN advisor to Premier Cheddi Jagan at the beginning of the sixties). I know from personal experience that Jagan was the type whose mental make-up made it almost impossible to get him to change his mind. This was the undoing of Jagan.
Mr. Jagdeo comes across to me (I may be wrong) as a leader that does not put much weigh on advice. He has been in power since 1999 and ten years is a long time from which one can make an assessment. A short history of Mr. Jagdeo would reveal massive (not tiny but massive) mistakes.
If the PPP was not a semi-fascist, tightly controlled and highly secretive sect, and was your typical democratic organization as we find in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, India, Anglo-phone Caribbean, he would have been challenged for his position a long time ago as early as 1999 when the GPSU strike showed that Mr. Jagdeo lacked conceptual complexity. He lost the strike and should have been reshuffled out of the Finance Ministry by President Janet Jagan.
I do not mean any personal disrespect for Mr. Jagdeo. I have a job to do as a commentator. But it is my sincere, deeply honest opinion that he is one of four Caribbean Heads that are poor in terms of leadership qualities. Three of them are past Prime Ministers.
They are George Walters of Antigua, Bernard St. John of Barbados and George Chambers of Trinidad. In order of whose is better among the four, my opinion is that Mr. Jagdeo is way behind the others. I would definitely put Portia Simpson of Jamaica in front of Mr. Jagdeo although she served for less than two years as Prime Minister.
It is possible that Mr. Jagdeo is conscious of his failings in leadership and he shies away from any open debate with prominent critics and opposition leaders. I have written about it several times and I will write it again – he is going to end his presidency without such a debate.
The latest debacles of Mr. Jagdeo are three in number. One is where he said in Trinidad that there will be the Freedom of Information Act in May.
We won’t have it in 2009 and I doubt we will have it under Mr. Jagdeo. He should have not stated a specific date. Secondly, he cites an international organization’s rating of Guyana being number 30 in a list of two hundred countries as having a free press.
What a terrible mistake to make! If that organization, Freedom House of New York, puts Guyana at 30, how will Mr. Jagdeo react when similar prestigious institutional institutions rate Guyana lowly in the realms of bad governance, racial discrimination, narco-trafficking, trafficking in people, openness to foreign investment etc?
If the press does it work, it can embarrass Mr. Jagdeo. For example, why is Freedom House to be accepted and not Transparency International and the UN report of Ms. Mc Dougal on racism, as a policy of the Government here? The press should ask Mr. Jagdeo why he accepts Freedom House’s rating of how his Government approaches the media but not Ms. Mc Dougal’s report on racial discrimination by his Government.
Finally, he accuses Khemraj Ramjatttan of impropriety in a duty free letter. But what about the more than fifty bogus duty free letters signed by a top Ministry official?

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