Successfully defining the political culture may help the defence team’s case against the President’s lawsuit

Jul 17, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
One can only hope that your Thursday, July 16 editorial, “Jagdeo’s lawsuit lacking morality,” in which the writer questioned whether the court will be partial to the President based on the need to secure career advancement opportunities is answered in the negative, and that the court’s verdict is based on the strict application of the law after hearing interpretations in the legal arguments from lawyers for the plaintiff and the defendants.
As per the editorial’s retroactive look at what obtained during the PNC era, there were, indeed, instances when PNC Government officials sued at will, and because the Judiciary was subjected to the paramountcy of the PNC, court verdicts often favoured those officials.
It would be instructive to note, for example, a similarity in one aspect of the President’s suit and one brought by then Labour Minister and PNC strongman, Mr. Hamilton Green, when Catholic Standard published an item stating that Mr. Green supervised political goons and thugs beating Guyana Stores Limited employees on strike outside their workplace on Water, Main and Church Streets in Georgetown.
The strike was called by the Clerical and Commercial Workers Union and the government saw it as politically-inspired.
Basically, Mr. Green showed up at the strike location in his car, followed by a truck load of men and women who then descended to physically attack the striking employees with sticks and whips.
Anyway, the court ruled in favour of Mr. Green and Catholic Standard had to pay for simply saying Mr. Green supervised the attack, so the main concern of the SN editorial that the court could rule in favour of the President is correctly premised if only because of a history of the courts siding with elites in the government of the day.
Ironically, after Mr. Green was expelled from the PNC in 1992, SNs’ David deCaires snagged a one-on-one interview with Mr. Green and asked him about the many allegations of his propensity for political violence in the past, and, without citing any specific example, Mr. Green simply chalked them up to ‘political warfare of that era’.
It was an admission that spoke volumes, even without the specifics, yet it was too late to reverse the suits he won.
With the President’s suit likely to go forward, unless he has a change of heart after carefully weighing the possibility of having his government go on trial to answer some very serious and potentially embarrassing questions, I think it is imperative for the defendants named in the suit to retain the best legal brains capable of interpreting the President’s suit against the realities of the political culture that obtained for decades, in which ‘political goons’ and ‘political thugs’ functioned as paid hires of the PPP and PNC to carry out the dirty and dangerous works against real or perceived opponents of the parties and government.
In the PNC era in government, political goons and thugs disrupted WPA meetings at which the late Dr. Walter Rodney spoke, and even brutally attacked and dispersed crowds gathered to hear him.
Rodney also often referred to Burnham as ‘King Kong’ and openly accused him of many atrocities, including ‘siccing’ the political goons/thugs on him, but not once did Burnham retaliate with lawsuits.
We know what happened to Rodney in the end, the same way we know what happened recently to one of the named defendants who was attacked with feces in his face for his outspokenness against the President and his government. The columnist actually said he has hard evidence that the feces attacked is traced right back to the Office of the President, and it could shock the nation how he came by that information.
On that part of the President’s suit that said the defendants accused the government of discriminating against Blacks, all the defendants’ lawyers have to do is revert again to the political culture nurtured by the PPP and PNC to reward their constituencies, divided strictly between Indians and Blacks, respectively, with government favours, such as jobs and contracts. This often led to cries from the losing party and supporters of racial discrimination, and so there is a reason for saying the government does discriminate.
If the defence team wishes, I can also cite a list of examples in which certain (not the majority) Indian Guyanese have benefited immensely from government favours, some under clouds of grave suspicion, but the same cannot be said of Blacks as equal beneficiaries.
Here’s only one vivid example: There is an Indian Guyanese named Dr. Ramsinghi ‘Bobby’ Ramroop, who acquired the GPC (now NGPC) and Sanata Complex in what some may see as ‘sweetheart deals’. This is the same guy whose company, QAII, also received illegal concessions from the government, and when the illegality was publicly exposed, the government asked its parliamentary majority to pass a law that retroactively corrected that illegality. This is also the same guy whose NGPC the government had Cabinet issue ‘waivers’ to that circumvented the Procurement Act (Law) 2003 for his company (NGPC) to make no-bid supplies of drugs and other medical supplies to the Ministry of Health and Georgetown Public Hospital. This is the same guy, on whose company board sits the CEO of the Georgetown Public Hospital; a clear conflict of interest. And there is more: he purchased Vieira television outfit and his name is allegedly in the running for other government-backed projects. Is there a Black Guyanese who received such exceedingly generous favours from government?
I want to close by asking Guyanese to seriously consider that the President is bringing a lawsuit he felt the columnist, in particular, libeled and defamed him, without the columnist ever calling him by name or title, yet this is the same President who publicly referred to the same columnist as ‘ugly’ and a ‘man-kisser’ without calling him by name. Paradoxically, the constitution that allows the President to sue, protects the President from being sued (or even being criminally indicted) while in office or after he demits office for acts committed while in office.
In fact, that was an original clause for Forbes Burnham, but the PPP, with tacit support from the PNC, refused to delete it during the 1999 constitutional amendments. The two are truly cut from the same cloth.
Look, there are examples I can reel off of acts committed by the Jagdeo Government, which the President sees as an extension of himself and presidency, which deserve lawsuits, criminal indictments and even a complete resignation of him and his government. But citing these examples are not merely to make him or his government look bad, but to get him and his government to stop treating the country’s resources as if they are private properties with which to do whatever they want.
Emile Mervin

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