At the instinctive level, PPP leaders do not believe in freedom, rights and justice

Feb 06, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Mr. Raphael Trotman surprised the nation when he told Parliament last week that the current session of the National Assembly would be his last sitting. Trotman told the Guyanese people that he is fed up with the divisiveness that accompanies the exercise of power. He went on to describe how opposition amendments are never accepted.
Mr. Trotman failed to mention that under the Forbes Burnham Government, Parliament allocated more time to Members’ Day than under the 19-year rule of the PPP. Members’ Day is devoted to opposition business.
One can understand the mental anguish of Trotman. He was familiar with energized attempts by President Hoyte to resuscitate institutions of freedom in Guyana.
If Mr. Trotman felt this way, then soon after the 2006 election, he should have taken the AFC out of Parliament. If Mr. Trotman is admitting in 2011 that opposition amendments to Bills were ignored, then after that trend was established, the AFC should have taken its politics to another level and forget about Parliament.
There were two other reasons why the AFC should have boycotted the House. One was the contemptuous rejection by the ruling party of Mr. Trotman’s completed Freedom of Information Act. The second fact was the ruling party’s refusal to implement the reforms proposed by the expert on parliamentary reform, Michael Davies, sent here in 2005 by the Commonwealth Secretariat
All three opposition parties in Parliament will have a Sisyphean task explaining to the electorate that their stay in Parliament was worthwhile. It has been a disgraceful display that has deepened the apathy that exists among the Guyanese people.
Mr. Trotman was being honest and sincere in how he felt, but he should face the question; “Why were you in there for so long?”
Any assessment of the nature of the PPP leaders has to include its approach to its own internal elections. If the PPP could not have granted its own cadres the right to make their choice in internal balloting why then would they have granted rights, freedom and justice to the society?
If you cannot give your own child a loaf of bread why would anyone expect you to offer the same to a beggar on the road? If you cannot tell your own employees “good morning” when you see them, who would expect you to offer that courtesy to strangers?
The story of the PPP’s ideological rejection of the fundamental premises of justice is an old textbook worth reading. We must never forget when we read the history of this country that the PPP went around the world screaming about American overthrow of Premier Jagan in the sixties while in the same breath accepting Russian invasion of other countries. When we read Guyana’s history, we must take note that PPP leaders fought the British and Americans to have multi-party election while they shamelessly endorsed the abolition of such a principle in Cuba.
There has never, I repeat never, been a person in the leadership of the PPP that frowned upon one-party rule in Cuba. Forbes Burnham once told a high-level meeting of the PNC in the seventies that; “You think you know Cheddi and Janet Jagan? You think they are democrats?
At the instinctive level, the PPP leaders do not believe in freedom, rights and justice. These are concepts that have no explanatory foundation in the ideology they grew up with under Cheddi and Janet Jagan. Why do you think only Moses Nagamootoo wants the party’s presidential candidate to be chosen by the party membership? Because at the ideological level, PPP leaders do not see this avenue as a democratic one. For them, the party leadership is the advanced arm of the masses.
It knows what is best for the members. There is not one PPP monarch or mandarin who will publicly say that now or in the future, the membership must vote for the leader
You compare the nature of power under Burnham and Hoyte on the one hand, and the PPP since 1992 on the other, and you can see that many areas of freedom under the two PNC presidents have been erased by Mr. Jagdeo in 2011. I sat on a bench in the corridors of the Georgetown Magistrates’ Courts last week and reminded senior counsel, Bernard Dos Santos that it all began with Cheddi Jagan.
As Premier, he took his tailor and made him manager of the Guyana Electricity Corporation. Dos Santos laughed. He said: “Yes I knew Mr. Yassin very well.”
As President, Jagan took his chauffeur and made him a board member of the Cooperative Bank. The tradition continues

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At the instinctive level, PPP leaders do not believe in freedom, rights and justice

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