Ghost, jumbie or poltergeist?

Jan 23, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Uganda, a thriving democracy in the sixties when it became independent, imploded in the eighties and became a failed state. Since then it has been trying to regain its place among democratic nations in the Third World. Uganda is all over the news all over the world because a stupid man did an unthinkable act of unspeakable immorality.
A Parliamentarian from the ruling party introduced a Bill in the National Assembly to assign the death penalty to homosexuality.
That is going far, very far. It wouldn’t happen because Uganda is a poor state that depends on the international community, like Guyana, for the larger percentage of its national income.
Sweden has already put sanctions on Uganda and PM Brown of the UK and US Secretary, Mrs. Clinton have already given the Ugandan President a warning about sanctions. But this is not the only dimension of the Ugandan story. This is the infamous aspect. There is an untold segment of this legislation debacle.
The Ugandan President has spoken out on the issue. He is not in agreement with the proposed Act. He told the media that it is not a consensus in the ruling party. The anti-homosexual proposition is actually a Private Member’s Bill. What has happened is that the ruling party has allowed one of its legislators to table his idea in Parliament though the rest of his colleagues have not told him they would support him.
On the other hand, the Parliamentarian in question is not forcing his colleagues to side with him. He is asserting his right to act upon an idea he has. And his party has allowed him that freedom.
Such a scenario is virtually, (the emphasis is on the adverb virtually) impossible in Guyana. It was Cheddi and Janet Jagan, under the rubric of communist ideology that introduced into the PPP the process of democratic centralism. This prevents party activists from openly disagreeing with all decisions of the leadership of the PPP.
What the Jaganite leaders over the past fifty years have never told their supporters is that the concept of democratic centralism is integral to both fascist and communist organisational culture.
No word is too harsh for people like Annan Boodram, Rickey Singh in Barbados, David Dabydeen and countless other admirers of Dr. Jagan and Mrs. Jagan. These people extol the “virtues” of this couple but refuse to see the fascist, Machiavellian culture they nurtured inside the PPP has become a permanent emblem on the face of the PPP.
Many learned East Indians would tell you how Papa Cheddi was modest, incorruptible, given to listening and they admire him for such possessions. But they never discuss the man’s humongous fault – he ran his party with a dictatorial fist and it was logical that his party in power turned out not only worst by millions of miles than the Forbes Burnham and Eric Gairy regimes but the most immoral and lawless junta in the history of the British Caribbean.
It has never occurred to misguided, poor souls like Ricky Singh and David Dabydeen that something had to be deadly wrong with the character of Cheddi Jagan that for over sixty years he deliberately chose not to name a deputy.
I grew up in Guyana and have spent all my life studying its politics and while Jagan was the leader of the PPP, you had some big names next to him; Ramsahoye, Benn, Ramkarran, Hubbard, Chandisingh, Nagamootoo. Their profile was high but they never had the organisational or legal designation of deputy leader.
As Jagan lay dying in a military hospital in the US, the very country whose medical services his wife derided in the Mirror newspaper just before she died, confusion arose as to who should succeed him.
What is happening in Uganda will never happen under the PPP. The PPP is a tight dictatorship characterised by fascist organisation layers. At the party congress in Diamond in 2008, when the media asked Robert Persaud to offer his comments on the significance of the congress, he said he cannot do that because the party’s General-Secretary, Donald Ramotar (the man who wants to be President) has issued an edict to party members that they cannot discuss the congress in public.
The German language (communism was founded by a German philosopher, Karl Marx) has an equivalent for the English word, ghost or the Guyanese creole term, jumbie. It is poltergeist. The poltergeists of Cheddi and Janet Jagan live at Freedom House where they both occupy an office which carries on the door the words; “Herein lies Democratic Centralism.”

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