The serpent bites those who are ignorant of history

Sep 23, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I have chatted with hundreds of former employees of the Burnham Government who had close ties with the leadership in those days. My repetitive question was why when the dictatorial instincts were being formed they didn’t intervene and suggested that such a route would cause trouble for the Government.

All the answers were the same; “Boy you couldn’t talk to Burnham about those things.” As you press on, they would tell you: “We shouldn’t have done this, we shouldn’t have done that; those were bad mistakes.”

I have interviewed Elvin Mc David three times, and on those occasions he expressed profound regret at the banning of flour and the hounding down of the WPA. I have spoken to dozens and dozens of confidantes of President Desmond Hoyte and the same old question was put to them. Why didn’t Hoyte seek inclusive governance seeing that rigged elections were no longer possible? Why wasn’t the Constitution changed so that Guyana at long last no longer has an African-dominated or Indian-controlled government? The response was just that same old line – “We couldn’t raise those questions with Hoyte.”

The people in the PPP are so ignorant of history that they cannot and will not see how

history comes back like a vexed serpent and bites them. Horrible things are going on with the present regime. The exercise of naked power in the present government has no parallel in the English-speaking West Indies. But no one can talk to Mr. Jagdeo.

When disaster comes and you meet the disempowered elites ten years from now in a café, looking faded and jaded, and you pose the robotic question to them, you will get the same old line – “We couldn’t talk to Jagdeo about those things. He would not have listened.”

Are people doomed to recreate the tragedies of the past? In Guyana, when you look at the PPP, the answer is yes. The PPP does not believe it can lose an election. Mr. Hoyte could not have been bothered with insulating the public sector from party paramountcy and the power of the President because he thought he was so popular, he would not lose the 1992 elections.

Before he died, he saw the virtual dismantling of the entire public sector by a government that had the power to legally do whatever it wanted with the entire realm of the public sector. Mr. Hoyte saw how the University of Guyana was cast aside, the Customs and Excise Department transformed into a tool of the Office of the President, the NIS brought into the net of party paramouncy, the state media reduced to a comical act.

Mr. Hoyte could have left Guyana intact. He died in frustration.

The serpent is watching the PPP. It will bite the PPP, but the PPP believes that it can defeat the serpent. The PPP is convinced that the unthinkable does not occur in history (Hey! Are you mad? Which Black man could become an American President?) and that it cannot lose an election in Guyana. So the serpent cannot poison the PPP with its sting. The PPP believes that it is so great an organization that there cannot be trouble in Guyana.

Men and women never learn. The PPP saw the 1992 election violence and how it repeated itself in nastier ways in 1997 and took on fiery dimensions after the 2001 poll. It saw violent gunmen destabilize the society, with one claiming that he was a freedom fighter for the liberation of African people in this land.

The PPP is seeing how unpopular it is becoming. It knows how African Guyanese feel about it. It is witnessing the multiplication of East Indian critics of its perverted rule. But men and women never learn the lessons of history. They don’t want to.

Can we envisage a Commissioner of Inquiry in this land with judicial powers to recommend criminal charges against the former rulers whose financial rapacity destroyed the country? Whatever is your answer, you can be assured that the PPP, from those ensconced in the privileged walls of Freedom House to those whose power are emblazoned on the walls of the fortress Mr. Burnham built in New Garden Street, will laugh if you tell them that this may be there fate.

There was a man who once controlled the island of Antigua, owned luxury yachts, private jets and shared out millions of American dollars to West Indian cricketers for fun. I wonder if the PPP boys know where he is today?

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