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President Jagdeo and a valuable, priceless road that was never taken

May 17, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I don’t believe and I would not believe that there is a person on Planet Earth who has read me all these years that would not expect me to write on the legacy of Bharrat Jagdeo seeing that the sun is about to set on his empire.
It is the norm in academia that an outgoing president will be assessed for his achievements or his non-accomplishments. Reading me for all the years, one cannot be that myopic to think that I have seen a presentable record of Mr. Jagdeo.
My deeply held, honest feeling is that no decent scholar could give Mr. Jagdeo a passing grade. Mr. Jagdeo simply never had it in him to be a successful leader. As to vision and leadership qualities, he never showed any discernible movement in that direction for the dozen of years he held power.
My sincere attitude to Mr. Jagdeo is that he inherited a position he could not have mastered because he didn’t have the qualities for so doing. It is as simple as that. This is a harsh life that you get a good insight of simply by reading Shakespeare. You don’t have to study philosophy to understand the nature of life.
The harsh reality is that Mr. Jagdeo did not possess the qualities that were needed to make him an admirable and finely fitted out leader of a troubled nation. And he is about to leave Guyana in serious trouble. If you want to understand the inherent weaknesses of Mr. Jagdeo or if you want to rightfully accuse him of the worst type of mediocrity then look at the concept of an apology.
All human beings, without exception, know that the apology is a device by which a situation against you is turned in your favour by the simple acknowledgement of being sorry or an admission that you were wrong.
Ordinary folks may not need to show remorse when they make inelegant mistakes but for leaders it is an indispensable tool. Unimaginably, Mr. Jagdeo puts no weight on the importance of an apology. What is too horrible to contemplate is the fact that Mr. Jagdeo may be too intellectually poor to understand the value of an apology.
In his twelve-year-old presidency, he has never once apologized.  It is outside the scope of a mere newspaper column to adumbrate on the political riches a public apology can bring to a leader whether Prime Minister, President or Cabinet Minister.
The gains to a leader are fantastic when citizens are glued to their television sets and they see their PM or President talking to them and accepting responsibility for a wrong direction. It plays on the psychology of a nation. You automatically think that this woman or man is made of greater essence or is of a moral type that would lead you to trust them. Twice, and now for the third time, in writing about President Jagdeo I recalled the apology from President Sarkozy of France when addressing the French people on his first year in office. He openly apologized for mistakes he made.
Both Sarkozy and Obama have less years in office than Jagdeo and they have apologized more times than you can count. And why? They are intellectually mature enough to understand the role and value of a public apology from a leader.
Again I say that Guyanese will find it horrible to accept but their President lacks the essential understanding of life to know how priceless a presidential apology is. For this one, I repeat, one reason, I think you can classify Mr. Jagdeo as a failure.
Mr. Jagdeo would have reduced the PNC and AFC, his critics and detractors, to ashes if he understood the prodigious enhancement of image that would have come his way if he was to meet the press and tell the nation that as Commander-in-Chief the buck stops at him. He could have apologized to the parents and the people of Guyana for the torture that was meted out to that fourteen-year-old boy
If he had done that and a scientific survey by a professional pollster was taken the next day, Mr. Jagdeo would have had a rating that would have floored all his critics. The value of a simple apology Mr. Jagdeo hasn’t come to grips.
How then could he have become a popular and highly admired leader? My own feeling is that I believe even more than Bernard St. John in Barbados, and George Chambers in Trinidad, that he will go down as the most intellectually ill-shaped, mediocre and failed leader the English-speaking Caribbean produced

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