Donald Ramotar is not and will never be Lula

Aug 09, 2011 Letters

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Dear Editor
I was shocked reading Peeping Tom’s article titled ‘Guyana’s Lula’ (KN, Aug 8, 2011). Peeping Tom should stick to peeping and not making faulty comparisons and erroneous assessments.
Donald Ramotar is not responsible for the PPP’s electoral successes since 1997. Janet Jagan and Bharrat Jagdeo were.
Until this year, Ramotar’s rankings by PPP supporters were always dismal. Further, as Peeping Tom himself or herself noted, the PPP already had an established political machinery built by the Jagans, not Donald Ramotar.
This machinery existed long before Ramotar became General Secretary.
In fact, since the deaths of the Jagans, the PPP’s electoral and political machinery has, like the country the PPP has overseen for 19 years, been mismanaged, corrupted, neglected, mistreated and become rotten with autocracy (remember the Stalinist show of hands selection of Ramotar), inefficiency and blind patronage.
As the 2006 election showed, the PPP won the election by ensuring more of its disappearing base turned out than the disappearing base of the other parties.
In fact, the AFC is the only party that gained anything in that election.
What is this nonsense about uncanny appearance between Lula and Ramotar? Apart from both wearing a beard, I am at a loss to see the uncanny resemblance. Just like I am at a loss to see Ramotar’s highly touted Amerindian lineage from his physical appearance.
Ramotar’s role as head of the PPP means absolutely squat when it comes to governance, government and policy-making for the nation.
The PPP effectively separated the government from the party. Donald Ramotar did not make government policy. The PPP knew why. The Jagans never saw Donald Ramotar as governmental material which is why he never got an appointment to a lucrative post in government.
Ramotar does not have a clue on how to manage a country much less how to manage a country and an economy with serious problems including cost of living, asset bubbles, global uncertainty and crime, inequality and corruption.
If Ashni Singh and Bharrat Jagdeo, who are both light years ahead of Ramotar in economic management, failed in the past 5 years to manage the economy and to control inflation/cost of living, Ramotar will be a disaster.
Peeping Tom is being disingenuous about comparing the Guyana of now to 1992. After all, 1992 is 19 years ago. Let us compare 2011 to 2006 and see where food prices and incomes were and talk.
Since 1992, there has been progress, paid for mostly by the taxes from the people and risks taken by the people to improve their lot. Nothing of substance in terms of policies from government to drive economic prosperity.
I will present statistics later to show Peeping Tom and others that since 1992, Guyana has hardly moved upwards in terms of economic development while a lot of the world has galloped away.
For at the end of the day, we live in a global economy and it is all relative. Ramotar and the PPP’s running on the track record of Bharrat Jagdeo is running on a failed track record.
Again, the people paid for the little development we have seen. Inequality, crime, corruption and cost of living have become crushing burdens of the Jagdeo presidency. In 19 years, the PPP spent $1.45 trillion (US $7.257 billion) excluding VAT and other amounts and most of it was spent by Jagdeo.
Most of it came from taxing the Guyanese people. Is Peeping Tom telling us that what we have seen in government-led development is/was worth that kind of money?
Peeping Tom, is Bharrat Jagdeo really the most popular President Guyana has ever had? Is he more popular than Cheddi Jagan?
I am yet to see this economic development Peeping Tom sees. Don’t tell me building roads, bridges and schools. Governments are supposed to do that.
And do it without the blatant waste, mismanagement, corruption and squander that it was done with under the Jagdeo presidency. Does Peeping Tom want us to believe that if the AFC, PNC, GAP, ROAR or any other party wins the election, it would not build infrastructure? It is what governments do and are expected to do.
Heck, the PNC built a lot of roads, bridges and other infrastructure between 1964 and the mid-1970s. Peeping Tom gets it all wrong when he claims that Jagdeo followed the IMF and World Bank script.
Jagdeo may have followed the IMF and World Bank script in borrowing money but he clearly hasn’t in spending it.
The IMF and World Bank script did not include the creation of massive inequality and income disparity nor did it actively encourage the creation of a potential asset bubble and definitely did not ask for corruption, mismanagement,
incompetence, waste and “squandermania” with respect to its money.
They did not ask for an underground and “narco-economy” to be created that rivals our biggest legitimate industries. Continuing this script will create more inequality and more crime.
Donald Ramotar had every opportunity to become Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 1997 when he was handed the General Secretary post of the PPP. However, he did not embrace democracy within his own party. He did not change anything within a Communist-structured political movement.
Lula is Brazil’s most popular leader ever. Ramotar is currently around 30 percent in national support and will never attain that level of popularity.  Lula was never the head of a race-based party. Lula’s social programs to re-engineer the wealth disparities and inequalities of his country are legendary.
Donald Ramotar sat silent in Freedom House while heavy taxes, collected from all Guyanese and from a majority of the working class poor of this nation were utilized to fatten the select few who benefited from contracts and other juicy benefits.
Ramotar was silent to the massive inequality created under the PPP. Lula pushed economic growth in Brazil into the stratosphere. Ramotar’s PPP oversaw the fall of sugar and the devastation of the economic potential of this country.
I highly doubt Ramotar will be able to fight cost of living much less build the economic utopia that Lula created. The plan to continue Jagdeo’s failed economic policies means that Ramotar will be, just like Jagdeo, tied to predatory big business. Donald Ramotar is no Lula and cannot ever be Lula. Remember that Ramotar sat on GUYSUCO’s board and played a major role in its directional missteps.
M. Maxwell

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