Same train, same conductor, same direction

Nov 08, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In the newspaper last Monday, Mr. Ralph Ramkarran published a letter in which he advocates taking out of the hands of the presidency and the government, the authority to confer Senior Counsel status on lawyers. He proposes to put the authority in independent hands.
There is a part of his assessment that needs repeating. Ramkarran informed readers that four lawyers were denied the status under President Burnham because of their politics.
Then he cited the situation of three lawyers who today are being denied the Senior Counsel honour because of their politics. What comes out most graphically from the Freudian pen of Ramkarran is the identical psychology of the PNC and PPP. You wonder if one day the PNC isn’t going to wake up and tell the PPP that “you guys aren’t different from us, never were and never will be so we are taking back the power for which you fought us down for twenty eight years.”
The mirror image of the PPP Government from 1992 with that of President Burnham’s regime is uncanny and frightening. Some time after 1992, there must have been a very secret meeting with Cheddi Jagan and Janet Jagan and their protégés and the decision was that “if we are going to keep power we must behave like Mr. Burnham, we must emulate the way Mr. Burnham used power.”
That message has become buried in the collective psyche of the PPP leadership and it finds expression in the Freudian copying of all of Mr. Burnham’s sordid deeds.
The pattern is not almost identical but definitely identical. The time and place and names are different but the game is played out with identical precision. It is a sickening case of copycat politics. Mr. Ramkarran reminded us of political interference then and now in the Senior Counsel scandal.
Under Mr. Burnham, Rodney got exiled from UG. Under Burnham, opposition activists got charged with treason. The PPP supplied itself with its own quota of treason accused. Most Guyanese believe there was a hand of the State in Walter Rodney’s murder and they feel the same about the way Ronald Waddell was killed.
Burnham as Head of Government sued a constant critic, Archibald Codrington, for libel. President Jagdeo sued this columnist. President Burnham took the Catholic Standard to court and so did President Jagdeo against the Stabroek News.
Burnham took control of the University of Guyana through the political composition of the Council. The PPP has copied this tactic with extreme zeal. The PNC Government behaved as if it owned the Chronicle and the country’s only radio station. The PPP does the same. The PNC Government removed the wife of WPA stalwart, Moses Bhagwan from her job with the state company, GPC. The PPP Government did exactly the same with my wife at GOINVEST.
Burnham denied a lawyer senior counsel status because his wife employed him as her divorce lawyer. Mr. Jagdeo has done the identical thing.
Burnham had his goons. They operated from the House of Israel. The PPP goons are more resourceful because today the money to pay them is plentiful. You had affiliation and/or membership with the PNC, you become a favoured one. This pattern remains firmly intact with the PPP.
High police and army officials took instructions from ruling politicians under the PNC; the PPP Government does the same shamelessly. The PNC Government had its share of mysterious deaths; the PPP has its quota. A wife of a PNC Minister died suddenly and suicide by poisoning was cited as the cause.
The exact occurrence visited a Minister of the PPP Government four years ago. President Burnham took over a 19th century colonial house at Belfield after installing a swimming pool at his other residence at Castellani House. President Jagdeo built a luxury villa at Pradovile 2.
To many analysts in psychology, politics and sociology, these two parties are victims of the post-colonial grab for power. What the white man had, they wanted. Democracy was the slogan used to fool the masses. There was never any appreciation and respect by PNC and PPP leaders, including both Janet Jagan and Forbes Burnham, for the ideology of liberal constitutionalism.
On the contrary, they had contempt for democratic institution. The rule of Mr. Burnham lasted from 1968 to 1985 when death intervened and Desmond Hoyte began the twin process of glasnost and perestroika. The reign of the PPP has entered its 20th year.
Most analysts and commentators and political observers believe the days of the tropical Mussolinis in power since 1992 are coming to an end. It may be an ignominious collapse.

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