Comparing Ramotar and Jagdeo

Nov 14, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Most intellectuals would say that it is unworkable to compare a president who held power for twelve years and another who is about to complete just one year. Analytically, it would not work. Ontologically speaking, it is quite possible for Ramotar to become a global phenomenon before he ends his presidency. He could do unique things that could cause him to hit the international spotlight, never mind the obscurity Guyana has on the world stage. But for now, his presidency is just a year old.
The scholarly integrity of this analysis will reside in the methodology of comparing the two men in terms of their political character, not the exercise of State power and an anticipation of Ramotar’s attitudes and behaviour in the future, based on what we know about him over the thirty-five years he has been in the PPP.
We repeat; the presidential comparison cannot be made because of the newness of Ramotar’s ambition. Nevertheless, it is not outside the scope of intellectual assessment to predict what President Ramotar will be like.
One factor that partially explains Jagdeo’s excesses cannot be adumbrated, because many academics would say that the material is unproductive in employing it to understand why Jagdeo was so oligarchic in his pattern of policy-making and so autocratic in his governance. I don’t agree and I vehemently denounce such a rejection.
This particular factor has been used in countless biographical studies, particularly two new books, one on Mahatma Gandhi and one on J. Edgar Hoover.
There are very few historians, if any, who would deny that an extreme, physical impediment can and did play a huge role in how some great leaders behaved. In a superb biography of Adolf Hitler, Robert Waite (“The Psychopathic God”) brilliantly uses Freudian analysis to prove that certain psychological and related factors were important in understanding Hitler’s attitude to sex, women, violence, chauvinism, bravery, patriotism and greatness. This is one of the best leadership analyses ever written using that methodology, and for this columnist, remains one of the best biographies ever composed.
This factor strongly accounts for some of the differences in the political persona of Jagdeo and Ramotar. Jagdeo, conscious of the role of this factor, tended to react to it by asserting his power. Ramotar does not have to go in that direction. But Jagdeo’s youth and obscurity in the PPP, led him in directions that would at this moment seem impossible for Ramotar.
Roger Luncheon, testifying in Jagdeo’s libel writ against me, said in cross examination that he first knew Jagdeo in 1992. That is when the PPP came to power and Jagdeo became special assistant to the Minister of Finance.
It means then that Jagdeo was virtually unknown to any of the top leaders in the PPP by 1992. To become the President in 1999 meant that Jagdeo was hardly, if ever, a party boy. This lack of party induction meant that Jagdeo didn’t have the conscious loyalty to the Jaganite protégés who, from the seventies onwards, carried the party blood in them and who were the leaders of the PPP by the time Jagdeo became president in 1999.
It meant, also, that Jagdeo didn’t embody the mountain of sentiments that these protégés had among themselves for each other.
These sentiments are what differentiate the political character of Jagdeo and Ramotar.
A good example of this was that as some of the top leaders were crying at the funerals of Shree Chand and Fazil Ally, Jagdeo didn’t display that kind of emotion. At the time of their deaths, Jagdeo hardly knew them, and had no memory or sentiments of them. Ramotar on the other hand is your quintessential party apparatchik. His loyalty is to his party and his seniors. This explains why most people think that Luncheon, Teixeira and Rohee are in charge of the Government. It is not that Ramotar does not want to stamp his image on governance. It is that at a deep psychological level, Ramotar wants his party to stamp the party image on the government, and not that of any individual.
This is where Jagdeo and Ramotar are widely dissimilar. Jagdeo had no reservation in looking beyond the PPP, bringing into the party his own discoveries and befriending the rich and wealthy. For Jagdeo, the government was to be run by the presidency, not by the party. This explains why he reacted hostilely to Mrs. Jagan when she criticized him for his policy of withdrawing advertisements from Stabroek News.
Ramotar and the older leaders of the PPP would not even for a split-second ever contemplate a word of unpleasantness against Mrs. Jagan. (To be continued)

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