The present, the future and the return to the theme of the past

Dec 29, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Citizens do not pay the same attention to the media at the end of year holiday season as they do during the year. I guess that is only natural. So during the Christmas fever, the PPP issued a statement that when looked at from any angle is oxymoronically comical and frightening and unfortunately it didn’t make for widespread debate around the country.
It is not the assertion from Freedom House that the Speaker of the next Parliament should come from the PPP, it is the reasons given.
First, the PPP says the opposition rejects winner-take-all but now is practising loser-take-all. But the opposition did not lose all. They won the Parliament. Why is the opposition a loser and the PPP a winner? Who won what and who lost what? Why don’t we have an exchange then? The minority party in Parliament (PPP) takes the Speaker position, and the loser of the plurality vote (AFC and APNU) takes the presidency? How about that!
What is the likely answer from a PPP analyst? Obviously, he will think it is an absurdity. The PPP won the presidency. By some weird logical contortion, it doesn’t seem to the PPP that the opposition won Parliament.
Secondly, the PPP says the decision of the opposition to name a non-PPP Speaker “does not bode well for future cooperation.” But why the future? The present is also part of the future. President Ramotar lived for eight years in what was once a communist country in Eastern Europe named Czechoslovakia.
Mr Ramotar and Clement Rohee lived in Eastern Europe where they were on the editorial board of the monthly journal, “World Marxist Review” of the world communist movement. Surely as a person who studied Marxist philosophy, he would know that Marxist dialectics do not see a disjuncture between the present and the future.
Someone like Lenin would have denounced the dialectical separation of the present and the future as bourgeois metaphysics. Fidel Castro’s countless speeches since 1959 on communist power have echoed this Leninist concept.
It follows then that cooperation between the ruling party and the opposition should not wait for the future but should begin in the present which will shape the future. It makes no sense for any Marxist activist to say that when power is possessed, they will use it in the future. The process of dialectical change has to start once power is acquired.
Surely, the Marxists in Freedom House have forgotten what they read from the works of Vladimir Lenin.
There is no Parliament in Guyana at the time of this publication. There is a presidency. There is no Parliament as yet in Guyana. There is a Cabinet. There is no Parliament at the moment. There is a functioning government. Why wait on the future then? The presidency, the Cabinet and the Government have the power to start the cooperation game between the ruling party and the opposition.
The combined opposition has no parliamentary status whatsoever. They have no locus standi. The 33 opposition names to Parliament are just what they are—names.
Naturally, it is expected that the cooperation game should have begun once the President and his Cabinet were sworn. Why do we have to wait until Parliament is summoned? The esoteric demand by the PPP for the Speaker to come from their preference is a frightening return to the theme from the past.
It would seem that the PPP after November 28 will return to what is generally expected of Freedom House – the hogging of power. It has been a gargantuan motif emblazoned on the clothes of the PPP since that party won the 1992 election. Local government reform is in cold storage because of one, single act of defiance by the PPP – the refusal to implement legal financial independence of municipal government.
At the moment, cooperation is stillborn. The Chronicle has return to the expected. That should be corrected to mean the Chronicle remains unchanged. A recent vicious and slanderous attack on Christopher Ram a few days ago is not good news for the present or the future. Not to mention the daily vilification of me continues.
The DPP recommended charges for Odinga Lumumba. Where is the case docket? That does not bode well for the rule of law in the present or the future.

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