Grey areas and not so grey areas

Mar 20, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The month of March brings the name Cheddi Jagan into focus. It was in that month he was born, and he died in March 1997. Once the talk in any circle, be it cocktail circuit, the rum-shop or over lunch or dinner, is on Jagan, the name Forbes Burnham comes up. For a long time, these two men were put into a context where one is the bad guy, the other the saint.
This thinking, though logical, had its faults. Burnham ruled Guyana with an iron fist and Jagan opposed him. The average mind then arrives at the binary of good versus bad.
In such a discourse, harm is done to Guyanese history. Though Burnham was a dictator, he may have had some positive values about him. Though Jagan was a man immensely admired for fighting against the wrong things Burnham did, he may have been a not so nice gentleman.
One of the revelations that I have encountered living all my life in this land is that I find among Africans, a willingness to concede that Burnham had done egregious wrongs to his nation. I don’t see this expression in Indians. There have been some Indian voices that have made their re-thinking public but that has come too late. But of course better late than never.
My belief is that as Guyana gets older, the mystique of Cheddi Jagan will evaporate and revisionist research will judge him harshly. We already have indictments against him in recent publications that will not be easy to demolish. I have referred to those particular texts umpteen time in my columns and need not repeat the names here.
The purpose of this essay is that as the month of March gets older and we hear the same old boring eulogies from his admirers, it is time his intellectual defenders do the decent thing and discuss the prodigious facts on Jagan that paint him in a bad light. It is time these intellectuals like Rickey Singh in Barbados, David Dabydeen in the UK, and people like Prem Misir and Randy Persaud reply to specific actions of Jagan and stop the repeated aridity of “Cheddi was a great man”.
In debating any long-serving politician, there are bound to be grey areas. In Jagan’s career there are countless.
We can go on endlessly arguing about what happened between him and Eusi Kwayana, Balram Singh Rai etc. But some offensive episodes stand out and must be confronted. One feels that this would never happen because in coming to terms with these bold facts, Jagan’s frailty, incompetence, lack of leadership qualities and manipulative instincts will come to the surface. We can start with his love of power. From 1964, he led his party in opposition. Until he died in 1997, that man never named a deputy. This was deliberate. Which other example you can point to where a party is over forty years old and there is no deputy leader?
This Machiavellian imprint of Dr. Jagan led to a huge quarrel while he was on his death bed. Mrs. Jagan claimed she was the logical inheritor, so did Moses Nagamootoo. Sadly, it led to the political demise of the latter. His conspiracies he has passed on to his party. Today in the PPP, there is no defined name that is deputy to the General-Secretary.
Take the Sugar Levy. Dr. Jagan led GAWU into a violent strike against the Sugar Levy when Mr. Burnham imposed it on Guysuco. The strike lased for four months. When Dr. Jagan became President, there was not even the vague mention of abolishing the Levy. This is where revisionism in Guyanese history comes in. Indians were told the Levy was designed to take money from the sugar workers while Burnham argued that it was a vital source of revenue for the country.
In fact, Burnham’s thesis had to be right because why didn’t Jagan remove it when he came to power? The point is, so many things about the PNC Government that Jagan told Indians were racist and wrong were non-truths and the Sugar Levy was one.
Space has run out to list more revisionist questions on Jagan but two quick ones must be noted. We are still living with Burnham’s 1980 Constitution whose powers President Jagan enjoyed from 1992 -1997. This was another source of violent opposition by the PPP with Jagan boycotting Parliament over it.
Finally, can someone explain if Burnham was a dictator, why did Jagan agree to merge the PPP with the PNC for the 1985 elections? Who really are the good guy and bad man in Guyanese history?

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