Ten years of Jagdeo: Leviathan rises

Aug 12, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Mr. Jagdeo became a morally elected president after the 2001 elections. Before that he was given the presidency by Freedom House therefore he had to “humble” as the Rastas would say. The PPP big wigs dictated to him even after the elections but he wasn’t ready for the confrontation. He knew he had to spend some time assessing the forces inside the PPP and gaining some more years in the seat of power.
His moment came at the beginning of 2002 when the Mash Day escapees used Buxton to destabilize the rule of the PPP.
It was a huge moment of fear for Freedom House. The Buxton gunmen took the fight to the PPP. There was no time in this configuration for party politics. From 2002 to 2005, the PPP became moribund. Policy-making gave way to preoccupation with the gunmen. The attack on the PPP congress in 2004 at Port Mourant had virtually imprisoned the PPP leadership.
Within the paralysis of PPP, Jagdeo saw his independence. The Leviathan was about to come out of the sea. Mr. Jagdeo along with Ministers Gajraj and Ramsammy began to strategise on the defence of the Government.
What followed was an unholy alliance between politicians and extra-judicial personnel.
By the time the last of the violent gunmen (minus Troy Dick) held up in Buxton was killed in a shoot-out in Prashad Nagar, Mr. Jagdeo was his own man. He was in control of the State, the PPP and Guyana. There was to be no turning back.
But he wasn’t the leader of the PPP, and Freedom House was the place that ran the party and its groups all over Guyana. Mr. Jagdeo had an ace and he used it with deadly realpolitik ambition. The front and second tier leaders of the PPP were patronized. But so were their relations, be they spouses, children, cousins and consanguineous members of the family.
What Mr. Jagdeo did was that he used his enormous state powers to make those with lesser power feel comfortable. In so doing, their lesser power became lesser and in a dialectical way, his power became greater.
The potent example of this realpolitik game was the controversy over the accusation by Khemraj Ramjattan that the President castigated him at a meeting of the Central Committee (CC) of the PPP over transporting PPP business to the US Embassy. Mr. Jagdeo then displayed his membership of the Machiavellian club.
At a meeting of that thirty-five member unit, he asked them if they heard when he uttered that statement. Only Moses Nagamootoo rejected the President. Important to note that at the time Nagamootoo dissented, he along with Ramjattan, were the only two members of the CC that had no employment relationship with the State. All the others in some way, either direct or indirect or through their families were in receipt of income from the State. It would have been financial suicide to side with Ramjattan and Nagamootoo
Mr. Jagdeo’s hegemony over the PPP is complete and extremely tight.
There is only one thing standing in the way of running for a third term and that is the PNC. The PNC cannot deliver this in Parliament. But there is likely to be a try for a referendum, though that will certainly throw the country into deeper madness than it is already in.
Mr. Jagdeo will win a vote in both the PPP’s Central Committee and its Executive Committee if the Parliament gives him a chance to run again.
He simply has the support in the PPP to get the party’s endorsement for 2001. When put to the test, he will get endorsed because it will be a repeat of the voting that followed the Ramjattan accusation. A PPP leader will be committing income closure if he/she votes against Mr. Jagdeo whether in a secret ballot or show of hands.
It was the 2006 election that sealed the fate of Mrs. Jagan. Mr. Jagdeo let her know that he had won two successive elections, he was the President, and he run things. As the Rasta fraternity would say; after 2006, Mr. Jagdeo “humble” Mrs. Jagan.
She gave up trying to be the behind-the-scenes figure that she always was in the PPP. Whatever you want to say about Desmond Hoyte and Bharrat Jagdeo, they contributed in an eerie way to the cutting down of the prodigious power that Mrs. Jagan always enjoyed in the PPP and since 1992 in the country. She died in anger knowing that she was evicted from the seat of authority by her own protégé.
It was the fitting end to someone who never believed in true democracy.

Apology:  In yesterday’s issue an editing error led to a publication that President Bharrat Jagdeo almost married the daughter of Parliamentarian Moses Nagamootoo.
That section should have read that Rajendra Rampersaud, who took a job with Clive Thomas at the University of Guyana, was slated to marry the daughter of Moses Nagamootoo.
The editor apologises for the mistake.

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