De Donald, De Gail, de votes, one year after

Nov 28, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I never campaigned in a general election in my country. The closest I came was in 1992 when I helped the WPA in small ways, but didn’t really thrust myself in that party’s campaign. Looking back I am sorry I didn’t.
I have always been reluctant to integrate myself in election politics. I feel it constrains you from preserving your independence. In 2011, I went fully into battle for two reasons, one situational, the other fundamental.
There were three persons in the Alliance for Change who I felt I wanted to see in Government and who I believed deserved my assistance in seeing them win. They are Nigel Hughes, Khemraj Ramjattan and Moses Nagamootoo. My heart and soul did not allow me to stay out of the battle of the AFC in 2011.
So I entered election politics one year ago. I have no regrets. I got closer to some fine, human beings that Guyana has produced
If there were not Nigel Hughes, Khemraj Ramjattan and Moses Nagamootoo, I would have still campaigned for some other party, including the PNC. This decision came from my scholarly mind, my activist soul, my humanist psyche and my selfless heart. I believed long before the 2011 election season started, with every bone and cell in my body, that the PPP that I witnessed in power from 1992 onwards was the worst group of politicians I saw in my country – including the regime of Forbes Burnham that I lived under.
Mr. Burnham banned me and my wife from working in Guyana and many times my emotion and my mind fought each other over whether I should use that personal vendetta of Mr. Burnham against me to judge his government as being worse than the PPP administration.
My scholarly training would not permit it. I would have been fundamentally a dishonest man if I allowed that emotion to cloud my scholarly mind.
I honestly and sincerely believe that the PNC from 1964 to 1992 was not as wicked, mischievous, undemocratic, unpatriotic, uncaring, violent, corrupt, venal, immoral, ethnically driven, incestuous, depraved, culturally uncouth, bombastic and attitudinally imperialistic as the PPP from 1992 onwards.
But I would conclude this section by saying that I don’t believe a Cheddi Jagan government would have gone in the direction that Mr. Jagdeo took Guyana after 1992.
The rest is now history. It is one year since the November 2011 general elections and never have I felt more pessimistic about my country. This one year has come at a time when history is being played out on a macabre stage.
I grew up in Guyana hearing the world preach about the virtue of free and fair elections. I grew up in the turmoil of the tempestuous struggle for Guyana to have free and fair elections. My indoctrination instructed me that free and fair elections produce legal victors who have the right to rule because they won; I repeat; they won.
Since 2011, the word “won” has lost its meaning in Guyana. Was I living in a nightmare when I was a young boy shouting to the skies for free and fair elections? Was there a winner in last year’s elections? It seems impossible to answer that question and what is even more scientifically bizarre is the curiosity as to whether the world can distinguish between a winner and a loser in a country’s national elections.
The Supreme Court of the United States of America did that when Mr. Al Gore told the American people that he won and his opponent Mr. George W. Bush said the same thing. The court decided who the winner was because the votes were there to guide the judges.
Are there votes in the 2011 elections to guide the Guyanese people as to who won the last poll one year ago? In power today is a man the newspaper I write for satirically refers to as De Donald. We are talking about the President. He sarcastically referred to the opposition as the people with a majority of one.
His other PPP acolytes do the same, particularly De Gail, the President’s governance advisor, Gail Teixeira. Ms. Teixeira who factually holds a Canadian passport and who Christopher Ram publicly says is in violation of the Guyana Constitution because of that fact, speaks contemptuously and dismissively of the majority of one.
In the collective mind of De Donald and De Gail, de votes in the 2011 elections didn’t produce a winner, so the opposition in parliament is in real life an esoteric entity best described as “a majority of one,” with the word “majority” having a pejorative meaning.

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De Donald, De Gail, de votes, one year after

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