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Does President Jagdeo know about a woman named Angela?

Oct 14, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I am convinced that if Mr. Jagdeo surmounts the legal and political impossibilities that stand in his way of being elected for the third time as President, he will never, I emphasize the word, NEVER, participate in an open, public symposium with his critics or face a live television debate with a call-in feature.
If he goes out into the uncertainties of tomorrow after his presidency finishes, he would have chalked up the infamous distinction of being the only elected ruler that never engaged in a popular 20th century political process that is expected of all politician – the debate.
It is inconceivable that a politician can be elected to the highest office without taking on his competitors. All those who secretly admire Mr. Jagdeo should know that this is one of his great fears. He will not exchange intellectual thoughts with his high profile critics because of the paranoid intimidation that he will not emerge a winner but will come out badly bruised.
And there is one and only one reason for this – his mistakes are gargantuan. Each occasion, Mr. Jagdeo hosts a press meeting, mistakes, avoidable mistakes, are badly made. Mr. Jagdeo opens his mouth at these press events and just says absolutely wrong things. There has never been a media meet and he batted well throughout the innings. In many instances wrong umpiring decision saved him.
Take migration. I want to be circumspect to His Excellency but surely, in a country with one of the highest exodus of skilled people; it is not in keeping with commonsense to retain your retirement age at 55. Commonsense would not allow for it.
A survey done by reputable polling institutions just before the German elections last week showed that one of the popular policies of Chancellor Angela Merkel was the raising of the retirement age for public sector workers to 67. Germany has skills overflowing. Guyana has none.
But in Guyana, where you can hardly find engineers with Master degrees, we retire people twelve years below the European model. Imagine that! Thirteen years since Britain is now 68.
Mr. Jagdeo knows this because at one of his press conferences during Carifesta, he told the press that the Ministry of Works cannot attract applications from engineers. Did this Guyanese leader ask himself why? I doubt he did because there has been no discernible change in the retirement age policy.
Again, I want to be respectful of the President but the exigency of the analysis leads me to think that this is incompetence of the worst kind. I say this because all countries do things that plug the holes that develop in their societies. If you don’t have people with skills, then how can you take a policeman, soldier, teacher, trained in the essential skills that a country needs and at 55, they are lost to the nation and you don’t have younger people to match their learning coming up to fill the ranks?
A majority of people in this country never read the PPP newspaper, The Mirror. Mrs. Janet Jagan was the editor-in-chief.  Before she died, in one of her weekly columns, she wrote that the public sector retirement age should be upped to 65. By that time of course, Mrs. Jagan couldn’t do anything about this desired policy-change because she was ousted from the corridors of power.
She never tabled the resolution of retirement age at her party’s executive committee because she feared that she would have been humiliated if it was rejected. About two years before she died, she was virtually devoid of any influence in her party and in the Government of Guyana.
Without being sarcastic, I thought that was poetic justice. This was a woman who single-handedly shaped the PPP into a semi-fascist outfit (using semi-fascism in the ideological and organizational senses)
We will return in subsequent columns to some of the infamies of past press conferences including the one on Monday in which Mr. Jagdeo again stumbled when he spoke of Guyana as perhaps the best country in the world in terms of consulting stakeholders; he pointed to the LCDS consultations. This is beyond belief.
In conclusion, it should be noted Guyana may not be able to stop migration but it hasn’t got the terrible constraints that other CARICOM countries have. We are comparatively large. Yet there are no housing schemes for teachers, nurses and civil servants. We give them land and help them build a home for their families and they may stay.
Yes, they may stay. Medical doctors get a hard time to secure a cheap duty free car. In Guyana, commonsense has departed from some people

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