Give the man his secret ballot!

Dec 30, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

As readers would know, I did not pen my column for last Wednesday because of imprisonment at Brickdam Police Station and missed out on analyzing the political trends that went on from December 21 to December 23.
In that time, Mr. Ralph Ramkarran was in the news. On Christmas Day, I went through all the things he said about the upcoming event in the PPP – the selection process of a presidential candidate.
Let me say from the outset that this article is not about which PPP candidate I prefer (none; I want the PPP to lose badly next year) though I will honestly say that only Moses Nagamootoo can stop the PPP from electoral diminution. My thoughts here are on the double standards that are shamelessly on public display.
Mr. Ramkarran wants the voting process for the PPP’s point man for the general elections next year to be done by secret ballot. This is all Mr. Ramkarran wants the PPP to do, nothing else. And why? Because he feels that he will benefit from that change.
What about the other changes that the ruling party should effect that would benefit the Guyanese people? On this question there is silence. And where is the evidence? View his two interviews with Christopher Ram and you will see that Mr. Ramkarran does not have any choice about new policy directions of the Government of Guyana.
We will come to those interviews below but first let us look at how Mr. Ramkarran conceptualizes President Bharrat Jagdeo.
Writing in the Chronicle a few months back, he interpreted the reign of Mr. Jagdeo as one of the best governorships the Caribbean has seen. He cited Mr. Jagdeo as the most brilliant Guyanese leader since Independence, putting his achievements even over Dr. Jagan.
He painted the President as a ruler who came close to solving the political and economic dilemmas that have plagued Guyana. Ramkarran made no mistake crediting Mr. Jagdeo with the successful removal of ethnic divisions.
When you read that commentary, one word stands out – phenomenon. To Ralph Ramkaran, Bharrat Jagdeo is a phenomenon
If Mr. Ramkarran is so smitten by his President why then is he in disagreement with his governor’s choice? Mr. Jagdeo obviously favours Mr. Ramotar.
The President has taken party paramountcy a step further by including Mr. Ramotar on many official, foreign, visits and in one instance, to a Cabinet retreat.
We come now to the Christopher Ram interview. The next day I penned my opinion on his performance. Any school child who watched that interview would brand Mr. Ramkarran a hypocrite in the context of his call for secret ballot.
When it was pointed out by Mr. Ram to this gentleman, who is a lawyer, and above all, the Speaker of the National Assembly, that the country’s President is violating the Constitution by not assigning the lotto money to the Consolidated Fund, his reply can only and must be interpreted as most shocking. He told his interviewer that every President has his style. Violating the Constitution is put down to a style.
I shudder to think what kind of president Mr. Ramkaran would make, especially against the background that I spent two days and two nights in one of the most horrible jail cells in the world.
So to imprison a ten-year-old child of an opposition leader or to close down an independent newspaper can be put down to style rather than dictatorship.
Mr. Ramkarran got conned. He thought that the President would have chaperoned him into the presidential candidacy. So he wrote his sycophantic panegyric of Mr. Jagdeo as part of his internal campaign.
When the crystallization moment came and Mr. Ramotar was manifested as the President’s choice, Mr. Ramkarran strategized that a secret ballot at the confabulation of the 35-member central committee could still propel him into the candidacy.
Interestingly, after Ramotar appeared as the presidential favourite, and after Nagamooto publicly lamented the state-sponsorship of Ramotar, Mr. Ramkarran removed his infamous praise of Mr. Jagdeo (carried first in the equally infamous Chronicle) from his web page titled conversationtree.com
So, according to Mr. Speaker, it is alright to deal unconstitutionally with the lotto funds but it is a bad thing to have an open show of hands for the voting of a presidential candidate. I don’t feel sorry for Messrs Ramkarran, Komal Chand and Navin Chanderpaul. They are still part of an 18-year-old dictatorship.
In a later column we will examine charges of racism at Guyana Water Authority (GWI) and the dismissal of 71 workers during which time Komal Chand sat on its board.

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Give the man his secret ballot!

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