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Democracy is coffee! Democracy is Obama!

Oct 12, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

There was Prem Misir. Then came Randy Persaud. And they are known. And people know them as doing what they must do. But there is Ravi Dev. And people do not know what he does but he is doing it. Dev then gets away with things that Prem and Randy are unable to escape with.

Prem and Randy are doses of pro-government offerings. It is expected that their writings will be subject to easy dismissal because we know where they are coming from.

Dev is more fortunate. His outpourings are more subtle. His eschews propaganda. So people think. But it is propaganda neatly placed in scholarly wrappings with an independent tag.

The tag reminds you of the story in the “da Vinci Code“. The deeper you look at the motif, what appears to you is deceiving. For months now, Mr. Dev has been distorting current Guyanese history, propagandizing for the Government of Guyana and passing these thoughts to readers as academic analysis.

One main current theme in his thought is the conspiratorial violent attacks on the state by African deterministic organizations, including the PNC on the PPP Government since 1992.

Yesterday, his piece is titled, “Democracy is not coffee”, meaning that we, the people, couldn’t expect instant results from the PPP Government because it has been besieged by the PNC. The same Randy Persaud who touched down last month to become the new PR Tsar wrote two years ago in a letter in the newspapers (to which I replied) that the PPP Government cannot get a breathing space because “mo fyaah, slo fyaah” is consuming the Government.

This is the identical assessment Dev produced yesterday. Dev is wrong; democracy is coffee. We can see that in the work of Barack Obama. In seven months of his presidency, Obama has produced some instances of instant coffee. He will be successful in providing health care to all Americans. He has reached out to the Muslim world. He has scrapped Bush’s expensive missile shield in Eastern Europe. He has ordered the closure of Guantanamo. He plans to free up the policy of gay applications to the armed forces. He may charge those that violated the Geneva Convention on torture.

He has also won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Where is the coffee in the PPP Government? Obama took seven months. The PPP has seventeen years and the coffee is still brewing. Macbeth’s witches did a better job in the art of brewing.

We need to explain to readers the weaknesses in Dev’s theory. For me, I am definitely certain in my mind that Dev is familiar with the contours of the PPP’s history to know that they had to end up like the PNC under Burnham.

I am absolutely sure that Dev has read the plethora of literature going back to the sixties by brilliant Guyanese scholars who argued that the fault line of Guyana is in the political culture of the PNC and PPP. Dev has to know that most analysts see a deadly similarity in the PNC and PPP conceptualizations of power.

Dev’s tragic weakness is that he is an Indian supremacist so he has to find excuses to excuse elected dictatorship in Guyana because it is staffed by Indians.

The story of the PNC is the story of the PPP. The story of the PPP is the story of the PNC. Jagan believed in party supremacy. So did Burnham. The PNC had to protect the interests of and augment the resources of a certain race group because it was their race group. The PPP has to protect the interests of and augment the resources of a certain race group because it is their race group.

This is the permanent fault line in Guyanese politics. It has nothing to do with assault on the PPP Government since 1992. It has nothing to do with “mo fyaah, slo fyaah.” It has nothing to do with the Buxton conspiracy. These episodes did have some impact. Any situations like those in any country would affected the body-politic.

The point is if there wasn’t a GPSU general strike in 1999, if there wasn’t a Hoytean attack on the Government in 1997, and if there wasn’t a ‘mo fyaah, slo fyaaah,” we would have seen them emerge anyway because the PPP is playing the game the PNC played when it was in power – ethnic discrimination, ethnic expansion, power hogging and incestuous politics.

The PPP Government became worse than the PNC, of course, for reasons which cannot be explained here but could be found in many, many of these columns of mine. So we have Prem, Randy and Ravi. An all Indian outfit. Oh! It can’t be. There is Kwame!

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