The song, the bell: Sung out and rung out

Nov 16, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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It tires your mind, burdens your heart and bores your soul to hear about a song that has been sung and a bell that has been rung more than fifteen years ago in Freedom House, home of the ruling party and the PPP presidency.
The song and the bell are about the country working together without acrimony and free of partisan attitudes in building Guyana. Every senior PPP leader, every Minister of the Government and all the Presidents since Cheddi Jagan died, (have said and) say this whenever they address even a boy scouts’ meeting. It never stops.
Last Saturday, President Ramotar repeated this most insipid statement in the PPP’s semantic ensemble. It is an excruciatingly boring repetition that demonstrates the Machiavellian destructive instinct that accompanies the administration of this poor, divided country. Addressing UG graduates, the merger of the statement and the venue was one of Guyana’s most poignant moments of bitter irony.
President Ramotar told the graduates that we (he means the people of Guyana) must work together without acrimony and partisan feelings.
This was said at UG of all places. This is a state institution dominated by the worst form of partisan blood-letting under Mr. Ramotar’s presidency (and before him, Mr. Jagdeo).
To add insult to injury, in the wake of the industrial action earlier this year, another partisan Council at UG was enacted, with Odinga Lumumba becoming a Council Member. If I know President Ramotar’s intellectual capacity to reason, I would say Ramotar would describe Lumumba as an independent citizen, just as Hydar Ally of the PPP leadership told me years ago he is an independent thinker just like me.
Ramotar’s epistemology is indeed a strange one. His understanding of the nature of knowledge is troubling for a President (but why worry; after all he is President of God-forsaken Guyana). What is objectivity, acrimony, non-partisanship in the lexicon of Ramotar, will need the most brilliant French deconstructionists to explain.
We have in Guyana, a government that understands no other language than acrimony. This is a Government that is so acrimonious that it asked the judiciary to rule on whether Parliament can pass a motion of no-confidence in one of its own members.
This is a government that is so acrimonious that on three occasions it has questioned the legal independence of the supreme institution of the land – Parliament – by taking it to the courts. This is a government that is so steeped in human insensitivity that it appealed a mere six-million-dollar legal award by the courts to an underage boy who was brutally tortured by members of the Guyana Police Force.
This is a government that, perhaps since the founding of the PPP sixty years ago, has never understood or accepted the meaning of non-partisanship.
Just take a cursory glance at any State institution and the ghost of partisanship opens its mouth like Jaws and swallows the Guyanese nation. We were just introduced to the “wonderfully, non-partisan” Broadcasting Committee. Except for the statutory appointment of an opposition nominee, this Board bears the Freedom House stamp that is larger than the square miles of Russia.
The same Bibi Shadick that heads this committee is also on the UG Council where she sits as one of four PPP Members of Parliament, including the presidential advisor on Governance.
Now isn’t the UG Council like the Broadcasting Committee, a school of non-partisan Guyanese nationalists?  How funny is the timing of Mr. Ramotar. His peculiar use of words came on Saturday afternoon, a day after the opposition accused his government of interfering in the Regional Democratic Councils that the opposition won in a free and fair national election last year. Is this non-partisanship?
We must remember that Mr. Ramotar spent eight years in Czechoslovakia as an editorial board member for the magazine of world communism, “World Marxist Review.” Communist epistemology would explain that knowledge is class-based and that words and concepts have no independent existence outside of their class moorings. One would surmise that based on his communist background, Ramotar would see the PPP as the vanguard party and therefore the embodiment of non-partisanship.
It is we the Guyanese people who are always partisan and acrimonious and the PPP leadership needs to teach us about such concepts. A UG lecturer who was present at the ceremony told me that when Ramotar advised his listeners to be less acrimonious and less partisan, there was a murmur that was loud enough to reach the President’s ears. They knew and he too, that he was talking nonsense.

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