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The eye of the tiger and Guyanese ironies

Sep 01, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The then US Ambassador to Guyana, Ronald Bullen sent back a dispatch that wasn’t an original thought. But the thought must have struck him anyway when the action occurred. What did Mr. Bullen say to his superiors in Washington, D.C. as contained in the WikiLeaks releases? Before we come to that, one sociological point and one infamous contradiction are important to note in the long years of the PPP’s existence.
First, Dr. and Mrs. Jagan created a culture of life in the PPP that has been with that party since its birth. It is a culture of superiority, intolerance, incestuousness and manifest destiny. No PPP member has escaped these identities. All PPP leaders embrace these characteristics, though in quantity they vary in each individual.
Since in the early fifties, the British wrote of Mrs Jagan as a person uncompromising in her hatred. (See the recently released classified documents from the fifties by the UK archives). This rigid approach to humans that the PPP leaders do not like, permeates the entire history of the PPP.
Secondly, there has always been a manifest level of extreme hypocrisy in the upper leadership of the PPP, the infamous case being western education versus learning in the communist countries. Dr. Jagan took a yearly holiday in the then USSR at the invitation of top communist rulers. Getting scholarship for his family members and relatives in the USSR was a piece of cake. Yet Dr. Jagan sent his son to study at the most expensive Canadian university, Sir George Williams University.
There was no philosophy Dr. Jagan could have used to mask that hypocrisy. For a man who was a fanatical supporter of the USSR his entire life and communism, he chose a western education for his son.The PPP leaders simply do not practice what they preach and never did.
So we come to the WikiLeaks cables. The then US Ambassador wrote that it is ironic that Dr. Roger Luncheon could have gone to the US for eye treatment while urging his fellow Guyanese to experience the Cuban medical services. Any Guyanese who has lived under the Jagdeo presidency would know that it was no original observation by Mr. Bullen, but it was surely one he was compelled to make contextually. I say it was not original because Dr. Luncheon’s action is graphically widespread among the practitioners of power and those who support these practitioners.
You cannot make a beverage, tell your employees it is better (in the case of Mrs. Janet Jagan who wrote in her Mirror column that Guyana’s medical services were better because the State offered it freely while in the US people suffered because they cannot afford to pay for it) than the competitor’s, and they must patronize you, but at lunch time you can be seen drinking your own competitor’s soda. That is overbearing hypocrisy.
The WikiLeaks cable on Dr. Luncheon’s US visit for eye treatment is published just two months after one of my columns reported on what I saw one evening at St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital involving Prime Minister Hinds. Let me repeat what I previously wrote.
I was with my wife who was waiting to see a particular specialist. Suddenly, Mr. Hinds came in with a seven–member security detail and sought the intervention of the specialist for an extremely minor accident. After he was strapped up, he said jokingly to me that I can write that “a certain person” beat him up. I repeat what I wrote back then, that even for this inconsequential injury, PM Hinds didn’t go to the Georgetown Hospital.
The leading kings and queens in the PPP and Government heap praise on China and Cuba but a detailed statistical research would reveal that these privileged ones and their relatives do not pursue tertiary education in these countries; they grab up the Western scholarships. I haven’t seen the statistics, but I doubt there has ever been one of them who went to Cuba or China for his/her education. The double standards in the pursuit of medical treatment are not only ironic, to use Ambassador Bullen’s observation, it is downright immoral.
These elites do not even use the private hospitals; the preferred route is the US. They will continue to tell the nation about China and Cuba while barefacedly avoiding these places like the plague. Can we bring this overbearing masquerade to an end? We can. A national election is two months away. No human being in this country can be so self-destructive to think that this country doesn’t need a change of government.

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