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Ramnarine’s ramenta; Rohee’s rohrsbordun

Mar 21, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

A particle has fallen from the character of a senior public servant and when one examines it closely, one sees it is a piece of courage. If we can see more pieces of fearlessness as the one that flew off Assistant Commissioner of Police, David Ramnarine, we can reclaim the integrity of the entire public sector that former President Hoyte so valiantly tried to restore after its dormancy in the Burnham era.
Unfortunately, for the brave soul of David Ramnarine, he has to contend with the Minister of Home Affairs, Clement Rohee. It is a tragic situation for a developing country that a pretender to knowledge like Rohee has been a Minister of Government for over twenty years.
Cheddi Jagan kept Clement Rohee in his Cabinet because for Jagan, the concept of brilliance was a bourgeois, capitalist invention. In communist psychology, brilliant is not inherent. Socialist culture can generate brilliance and genius once the relations of production are not in capitalist hands.
One of the most egregious aspects of philosophy is a Marxist approach to aesthetics and epistemology. It is a superficial understanding of the aesthetic underpinnings of the human condition and the nature of the knowledge. Both Cheddi and Janet Jagan had no time for any other interpretation of philosophy except Marxist epistemology.
Against this backdrop, Jagan made his tailor the manager of the nationalised electricity company and put his chauffeur on the board of the Cooperative Bank.
I am still bewildered how a learned man like Ian Mc Donald could refer to Cheddi Jagan as a genius. I am not a fan of Forbes Burnham. I think he was obsessed with power but the term genius more suits Burnham. The essential difference between Burnham and Jagan is that though they were both hungry to control Guyana within their narrow ideological confines, Burnham was far above Jagan in applying philosophy to politics.
While Jagan kept a whole generation of semi-educated protégés in the hierarchy of his party, Burnham from a background of Africanised Anglo-Saxon, middle-class values sought people with prodigious learning.
Burnham would have probably given up his throne if he was forced to appoint someone like Clement Rohee as his Foreign Minister. Ninety percent of Jagan’s state appointees were mediocre. One can say the same for Bharrat Jagdeo. We expected a clean break with this jejune past, from Donald Ramotar. It wasn’t to be. Mr. Ramotar is in a recycling mood.
Mr. Ramotar has kept Clement Rohee as a senior Cabinet Minister, after he had served 19 years as such, violating a basic law in human nature. If you cannot do anything right then you are not going to find life a sweet smelling rose. Clement Rohee, like so many of Cheddi Jagan’s protégés, is not leadership material.
After 19 years as a Cabinet Minister, it was time for Rohee to be given his exit from power. His tenure was marked by a shocking controversy over the refusal of the American Government to give him any type of visa (one day soon I will reveal the reason for the denial).
To date, Minister Rohee has said all the wrong things associated with dictatorial politics and has done all the wrong that inhere in authoritarian politics. In short, Clement Rohee is instinctively an autocratic personality.
Rohee is too unlearned to understand why David Ramnarine took the public position that he did. Rohee will never understand it because the intellectual factor is missing. It involved money that should have been assigned to the men and women under the command of Mr. Ramnarine.
His credibility and his career were in danger of dissolution because Ramnarine didn’t receive the sums for his subordinates but had he shut his mouth his lower ranks could have been led to believe that their superior refused to feed them and used the funds for other purposes.
All Ramnarine did was to set the record straight in relation to his sphere of operation during the general elections. That was his public obligation. That should have been the end of it. Mr. Rohee, his boss, the President and the Minister of Finance, should have then chased down the $90M that was suppose to feed the police who were assigned election duties for the General and Regional polls last November.
Instead, Rohee descended to the comical and autocratic levels that he is so accustomed to. But Mr. Rohee cannot get anything right. A more sensible thing to do is, after threatening Mr. Ramnarine, to save face by explaining where the $90 M went. Rohee is yet to do that.

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