Donald Ramotar opens his innings

Dec 15, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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There are some disturbing moments in the way the President has opened his innings… at how he is batting. There is no prodding forward with bat behind pad to negate an LBW appeal. There are no tentative probes. There is no careful scrutiny at how the wicket is playing. Mr. Ramotar is batting as if he intends to tell world-class spinner Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan that he is not going to be deterred.
The ground is hushed. No spectator is saying a word. The attendees are just watching without comment. They are just watching.
The first boundary comes with a swashbuckling drive over the head of Warne to the boundary. Mr. Ramotar drove straight down the wicket when he named his Cabinet. It signaled to both Warne and Muralitharan that he is not going to be bogged down.
First, the Cabinet is more pro-Jagdeo than pro Ramotar. Who’s in charge, man?  Secondly, the composition runs against the principle governing the Cabinet. If you don’t need someone with medical experience to administer the Health Ministry then by the same logic you don’t need a lawyer to be an Attorney-General.
By what logic do you take a lawyer and put her to head the Education Ministry when at the same time you are operating with the concept of a Minister within a Ministry. So if you are looking for legal skills in the Ministry of Legal Affairs by assigning a lawyer there (Nandlall) then strengthen the place with more legal skills and appoint Manickchand as the Minister within the Office of the AG.
It has to be the most mysterious Cabinet move in the entire world that you take a bio-chemist who has been at the Ministry of Heath for ten years and you put him at a place where he has no previous experience. I refer to Leslie Ramsammy from Health to Agriculture.
If anyone on Planet Earth puts his foot in his mouth, it is Roger Luncheon. Not only satisfied with devastating his own government by answering Mr. Nigel Hughes’s questions in court in the most insensitive and bizarre ways, Dr. Luncheon told his press conference that Ramotar’s Cabinet shape was in keeping with the need for continuity. If Ramsammy from Health to Agriculture is continuity then we should make Kwame Mc Coy, the Minister of Culture and Youth and Sports. That would constitute continuous sporting.
How Juan Edghill found himself as a junior Minister of Finance should not surprise anyone. How can any Guyanese utter shock and dismay at Edghill’s new post? Cheddi Jagan made his tailor the General Manager of the nationalized electricity corporation. Cheddi Jagan when he became President in 1992 took his chauffeur and put him on the Board of the Guyana National Cooperative Bank.
Bharrat Jagdeo made “Killaman” who has no known academic qualifications, the Chairman of the Board of the premier investment institution in the county, GOINVEST. Bharrat Jagdeo took Evan Persaud, an alleged sex talker at UG, and made him the Chairman of the Advisory Broadcasting Committee
Under Mr. Jagdeo, we had an Attorney-General who told the Guyanese nation through his reported press conference; “When ah hear deh talking about a Ministah who does do illegal things I taaght it was me deh referring to because I is a man who like to do dem things.”
Please do not feel bad about Edghill’s position in the Finance Ministry, the Government put Kwame Mc Coy on the Rights of the Child Commission. These acts of Shakespearian comedy go way, way back to the early PPP in the early fifties.
So The Donald opened his innings with bravery and abandon. The Donald extended the number of Ministries from what Jagdeo had established. Funny eh!  A little, poor Third World country has a larger Cabinet than the super-power, the USA and all of the major developed countries.
Berlusconi was a buffoon alright but his Cabinet in Italy was much smaller. Let’s leave the Ministerial dome and see what other stroke play The Donald made. The police and the Minister of Home Affairs both concluded it was wrong to shoot rubber bullets into a peaceful demonstration. But the victims were not only shot but hauled before the courts. Someone was not sensible and forgiving.
By now the Donald innings has awakened the spectators.  The charges involving violent robberies against Shawn Hinds were dropped on Monday. The press carried stories during the campaign that Hinds, on bail, was in the employ of a certain Ministry. One of Guyana’s leading senior journalists told this writer that he has a photo of Hinds at an important State function last week.  Who’s in charge, man? Ramotar or Jagdeo?

EDITOR’S NOTE
In the edition of KN of Wednesday December 14, Freddie Kissoon in a column entitled, “Expressions of Human nature after the elections” exceeded the freedom accorded to him by this newspaper by wrongfully stating that Sir Ronald Sanders “in his KN columns earlier this year, opined that the ruling party will win because of Mr. Jagdeo’s economic policies. He subsequently outdid himself by asserting that under the PPP Government, Guyana is reclaiming its lost El Dorado”.
KN disassociates itself from these comments which are entirely false.  In no column appearing in this newspaper has Sir Ronald ever opined that the PPP/C would win the election because of Mr. Jagdeo’s policies.  Further, he has never suggested that the PPP was reclaiming its lost El Dorado.  What he did say was that Guyana was fortunate that its vast natural resources, such as gold, which were bringing in increased revenue, would allow it to reclaim its place as an El Dorado.  He stressed that this would require prudent management of resources.
Unlike Freddie Kissoon, Sir Ronald does not write for a Guyana audience alone; his commentaries are syndicated throughout the world.  KN apologises to Sir Ronald for not identifying the errors in Kissoon’s column before it was published.

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