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Is this evil? The revelations of Moses Nagamootoo

Aug 29, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The first time I met Dr. David Dabydeen was at a small party at Moses Nagamootoo’s house. I was the only one in the crowd that was not drinking. I hate alcohol, any form of it. I was bored so I asked Moses for chocolate. He brought out a box. Most of the enjoyment was in the garden. Dabydeen and his wife came into the kitchen where I was, and my moment had arrived. I wanted to talk about politics. Dabydeen said to me that he was long smitten by Cheddi Jagan. I was about to tell him that there has to be a body of action from which admiration stems, and as I was about to ask him to justify why he admired Jagan, the drinking crowd was upon us.
Last month, Dabydeen was in Guyana and one of my Kaieteur News colleagues was going to see him so I sent a message requesting an interview. He agreed. Days later when I called I was told he left the same morning that I made my inquiry. The reason for bringing Dabydeen into the picture is because he is a very close friend of Moses Nagamootoo. Dabydeen named his first son after Moses. My eagerness to interview Dabydeen has increased by leaps and bounds given the revelations of Nagamootoo in the two independent dailies last week.
How does Dabydeen feel about the famous couple that he so admired now that they have been finally exposed by his friend, Nagamootoo?
Nagamootoo has his faults. No one can deny that. The past three years he has walked with his eyes wide open into the pool of self-destruction. Even the school children who take an interest in politics would know that once he went back to the PPP in the 2006 elections then was refused his Cabinet request that he was done with, that he had self-destructed.
For me, the incident that will forever live in my mind and that has caused me to withdraw any respect I had for him was the format of his 60th birthday party. His featured speakers were Mrs. Jagan, the President and Mr. Ramotar. Here was a man who told so many of us about the evil in Mrs. Jagan and the terrible things she did to him out of the fear she had that he would be Cheddi’s successor, actually warming up to Mrs. Jagan at his birthday party.
The lowest moment in Mr. Nagamootoo’s career was when he told his guests that there was never a problem between him and his party. I got a call from one of the guests while Nagamootoo was on the floor. He told me; “Freddie, I can’t believe what I just heard.” I wrote about that incident twice in my columns which analysed the politics of Nagamootoo.  Sad to say but Moses Nagamootoo, given what he wrote two Sundays ago has finally walked away from “his party.”  I wrote once and I will write it again; to me, over the long years that I have known him, he came across (except for EMG Wilson that I loved) as one of the PPP leaders who was less rigid, more open and less doctrinaire. He also had a very friendly way about him with dealing with non-PPP personalities.
Despite his faults, one cannot help but show empathy with him over his mistreatment by Mrs. Jagan as he described in the KN and SN two Sundays ago. Nagamootoo devoted his canvas to painting Mrs. Jagan. But with a Freudian brush, he painted the same negative colours over the visage of Cheddi Jagan. Thousands of us who knew Cheddi Jagan would believe what Nagamootoo wrote. We saw the nastiness, the evil, the incompetence in the man. Now Nagamootoo has depicted it for us. For a long time, political observers knew that Mrs. Janet Jagan was the de facto leader of the PPP and that Cheddi Jagan was too politically, intellectually and psychologically weak to run the PPP. Mrs. Jagan was the real Premier of British Guiana. It was she who gave the orders to participate in the violent tit for tat. I know of one case where my evidence is incontrovertible that Mrs. Jagan ordered the assassination of a certain media personality in the sixties. He survived.
So Moses told us that Cheddi earmarked him as successor and on hearing this, Janet drew out the Macbethian dagger. And where was Cheddi when Janet was sharpening her dagger and Moses was begging Cheddi to stop her? Cheddi couldn’t act. He couldn’t stop her. He couldn’t prevent the real leader of the party from shaping it the way she wanted it. Keep writing Moses!

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