Winston Murray, please get better for Guyana’s sake!

Nov 16, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I got to know Winston Murray when we constantly met on the Demerara Harbour Bridge as joggers. I didn’t know he lived near the waterway so I enquired whether he traveled from Georgetown for the jogging.
It was then I knew that he lived opposite the structure. We talked of course. And I learnt many things about him, the PNC and Guyanese politics.
I have spent my entire life in political struggle. I hope to bring my activism to an end if the PPP loses the next election. I do not think Guyana has seen or ever will see a group of rulers as culturally unfit, aesthetically unpleasing, nationalistically suspect, shamelessly corrupt and politically degenerate as the present Freedom House cabal.
If the PPP loses, then a new dispensation will come into being. I think it is time for me to close that chapter of my life. But it will be sad if someone like Winston Murray should not be around to create that new horizon. Talking to Winston Murray on the bridge was a learning experience.
My training in philosophy tells me that you can never define the character of another human being. But in chatting with Winston Murray there is the inevitable conclusion that you are relating to a Guyanese politician who has integrity, loves his country and would be a good leader for Guyana.
There was no question about it – I sense from our interactions that Murray was a decent human being that is made of positive cloth. I believe deep down in my heart he is.
I am still wavering about my vote – to give it to the AFC or to Mark Benschop’s Independent Party. But most definitely, I would vote for Winston Murray to be the president of this territory. And I believe in my heart he would make an excellent leader of the nation.
One of the things I learnt from Murray on those sunny, tropical afternoons on the bridge is the powerful role sentiments play in the life of a human being. This is an aspect of human existence I have no direct experience in. For me, sentiments are part of human nature, human psychology, human character but sentiments have their limitations when it comes to human rights.
Two examples I will give. President Desmond Hoyte reversed President Burnham’s ban on me working at UG. But I was opposed to the policies of Hoyte from day one of his assumption to power and I was actively involved in political struggle against his government.
Sentiments should not have come into play there. The same with Boyo Ramsaroop. I owed him big time. He brought me into politics. But I resented his deliberate blindness to the egregious sins of the Jagans. Even though we spent a life time in friendship, he couldn’t get me to give even a cent, one cent to a PPP-fund-raising event. Sentiments had no place in that decision
I once asked Murray why he stayed so long with the PNC and if it wasn’t time to go over and help form the AFC. His attitude was one that I heard so often in my life, couldn’t understand and didn’t want to comprehend.
He said; “Freddie, the PNC is part of my life, that is all I know, that is where I belong.” It was clear to me that he saw the PNC as more than just an organisation to which he belonged but visualised and contextualised the PNC the way people do with their families – that the PNC was essentially a part of Winston Murray’s existence.
It would seem to me that Murray loved the PNC as any other thing in his life.
It was the fitting climax that he probably would have become the leader of the PNC in a few months’ time.
I can’t say I know Murray that well. I know he opened up to me and uttered feelings that I am not at liberty to express at this moment. But I discern in him a yearning to set the record straight about the Hoyte interregnum. Murray believed that Hoyte would have done phenomenal things for Guyana and that he, Murray would have been one of the architects of this new Guyanese world. Murray felt he had the love in his heart to make the PNC Government acceptable to the vast community of East Indians.
He felt that the Hoyte era and the trust Hoyte placed in him, there would have been a revolution in race relations in Guyana. Murray and Hoyte were not allowed to continue. The loss at 1992 prevented that. It’s a tragedy what has happened to him.

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Winston Murray, please get better for Guyana’s sake!

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