Victims of Medusa

Nov 12, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

There is a long list of educated politicians who were happy to serve in an organization where power was centralized in the personality of a Leviathan and democratic structures were non-existent. Democracy was a choice that had episodic existence based on the mood of the maximum-leader.
This has been the history of political parties in Guyana. Even in the smaller units, the life of the party revolved around an omnipotent figure – Peter D’Aguiar in the United Force, Paul Tennassee in the Democratic Labour Movement, Ravi Dev in ROAR (whatever that means) among others.
The brilliant exception was the Working People’s Alliance despite the towering presence of Walter Rodney.
One hopes that the Alliance for Change is not making the same mistake.
What makes educated people fall prey to an all-powerful leader who is synonymous with the party that these people embrace? One can understand less intellectual minds becoming enslaved to those who mesmerize them with charisma and demagoguery but surely not men and women with experience and learning.
The list of Medusa’s victims is long and goes way back to the 1950s with Burnham and Jagan in their respective parties. Recent causalities include Trotman, Ramjattan, Vincent Alexander, Aubrey Norton, Winston Murray, Moses Nagamootoo and the latest being Komal Chand (of sorts).
Vincent Alexander is the one episode that confused me. We grew up on the same street in Wortmanville; well, not really – I in Hardina Street, and he, around the corner in Bent Street. Alexander always appeared to me to be above the other PNC leaders in terms of analytical power, culture and integrity.
One would have predicted that he would have ended up being a maverick. He turned out to be a faithful servant of his party, the PNC under two maximum leaders – Burnham and Hoyte. When he rose to challenge Hoyte’s successor, Alexander found that it was an impossible task. His party was too centralized to allow doors to be opened.
Aubrey Norton watched as his leader extirpated internal democracy and ostracized Alexander and his team. Why Norton would not have learnt from history only he can explain (met him Saturday night at Julian’s but the time was not conducive for such a question).
Norton did his Roman-like thing against Alexander because he wanted to procure the leader’s seat eventually. When it was time to make his move, Medusa moved in; Aubrey Norton has been ostracized too by the same man who sidelined Alexander. The least said of Moses Nagamootoo the better.
We come now to Komal Chand, the head of the sugar union, GAWU. Before we move to Chand, here is a little story about a Central Committee member, Sadie Amin, who was so in love with her party, the PPP, that she told me at NAACIE’s head office one evening; “Freddie, I adhere to what my party says; principles come second.”
This was about the mistreatment of UG’s autonomy by the Leviathan. Months later, I ran into Ms. Amin on Croal Street while she was going to court (she’s a lawyer). She told me that she had left the PPP. Her husband was overlooked for a deserved promotion at his workplace in preference for a party blue-eyed boy.
Chand’s union is locked in a torrid dispute with Guysuco. Chand did an interview with NCN television and he complained to the press that NCN has been instructed not to broadcast the programme. This same Chand has been in the policy-making decision of the PPP since it came into power.
He is a party devotee. He has been silent the entire seventeen years of PPP’s authoritarian degradation of the state media. This same Chand is on the Board of Directors of GWI. Under Karrran Singh’s tyrannical control of GWI, almost seventy persons from one particular section of the Guyanese population were dismissed.
I sought an interview with Chand when a GWI employee with 30 years service and mortgage payments was dismissed without a hearing. Chand was happy to tell me that he is not giving the interview.
This same PPP hard-liner now runs to the Kaieteur News and Stabroek News and requests that his union’s press release about NCN’s denial of the right of his union to reply be published. And guess what? Chand eats his cake and has it too. The private media carried his press release.
But more than seventy workers at GWI lost their jobs and the society never heard a word from Chand. Will we see a new Komal Chand? Will he speak out about the Leviathan’s elected dictatorship in Guyana?
Or will he be happy to go along with the tyranny his Government has become because, like Moses Nagamootoo, he loves his party?

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