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Elevating the man

Aug 11, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

A little bit of interesting news just got completely lost. Some months ago, it was announced that the Office of the President installed an elevator to facilitate Dr. Luncheon to his office. A back problem of his, makes walking up flights of stairs almost impossible. The obvious question that comes to mind was why not the transfer of his office to ground level. In this modern age, you don’t need to be in close physical proximity to another person to effect effective communication.
I lived in Guyana when the PPP was in opposition and that piece of news during the reign of the PNC Government would have been given front page coverage by the PPP’s newspaper, the Mirror (what has become of that paper anyway; overran by the Chronicle and Guyana Times I suppose). Whoever that elevator was put for in those days would have earned the acidic scorn of the PPP. And naturally, the PPP, when it was not boycotting Parliament, would have raised the issue in the National Assembly.
When you hear these kinds of things, you wonder why Guyana could not have seen through the PPP in all those years when it was in opposition.
The PPP as a historical Guyanese organization is dead. No one with a decent mind would place the PPP in any great context (except in the formal, biological sense of history) after what the PPP has become the past nineteen years since it acquired power.
Looking back over the years after 1964, it tantalizes the psyche to think that not only a majority of Guyanese but Caribbean people, and probably the world, saw this particular organization in a positive light, supported it and wanted it to become the government in Guyana.
How could Guyana, the Caribbean and the world be so wrong? It is not that the PPP is your run-of the-mill regime that mixes the good with the bad, has its episodic faults, does a little bit of skulduggery now and then, but overall is a pleasant administration that does a plausible job and should be tolerated.
At the deepest level of human thinking, this party that runs the country is anti-freedom, anti-democracy, anti-people, crude, incestuous and corrupt in the most diabolical of ways that makes it the worst government the Anglo-phone Caribbean has seen. And most shockingly, it consists of people that the world admired from 1964 to 1992.
If anything is certain, if anything is more predictable than the change from day to night, it is that there will be a commission of inquiry into the reign of Mr. Jagdeo if the PPP loses the general elections. Governments change all the time in the world, but in the case of Guyana, it is impossible for a political party to win the government and survive without commissioning a judicial review of the past regime. From the schoolboy to the man in his nineties in a wheelchair, they will make demands for an inquiry. All Guyanese will want it.
I doubt the scope will take in the years of Dr. Jagan and his wife. The emphasis will be on Mr. Jagdeo. The review will be a long one, taking in more than a year and hundreds of witnesses and mountains of documents. The questions are endless.
Did the conservancy overtop in the great flood of 2005? What were the circumstances surrounding the death of so many hundreds of persons from 2002 to 2005, including prominent Guyanese like Minister Sawh and Ronald Waddell? What was Roger Khan’s relationship with the Jagdeo cabal? What did Captain Clarke tell the Americans in the Justice Department to cause a judge to free him and for him to be given permission to live in the US?
What is the true story behind Clico in Guyana? What was the relation between Clico’s Geeta Singh-Knight and the key players in the regime? What did Maria Van Beek know that brought on an attempt on her life? Surely, she must be asked to testify. If not the panel could travel to Europe to interview her.
Who benefited when NBS bought Clico’s bonds in the company that owns the Berbice Bridge? How did the NBS become such an intimate associate of the ruling clique? Who is the godfather of Fip Motilall? What is the truth behind the polar beer scam?  Why was Rohee’s American visa denied? And Henry Green’s too. How many people got prodigious concessions on the wharves because of their connections?
Let’s hope we have a change of government.

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