The chicken and the egg

Dec 04, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

One may find it politically useful to knock Mr. Ralph Ramkarran and Dr. Henry Jeffrey for an outpouring of criticisms on the terrible direction their party and government have gone when one knows that Dr. Henry Jeffrey was a Minister for eighteen years in that very regime and Mr. Ramkarran was in the PPP leadership since the seventies. He broke with the party only in 2012, that is, after the PPP was in power for twenty years
On the academic level, it makes no sense to go on carping about why they didn’t try to change the PPP journey when they saw the beginning of the nakedness. Castigations of Messrs Ramkarran and Jeffrey aren’t going to make us understand why the PPP has exceeded the excesses of the Burnham era a prospect in 1992 that seems literally impossible.
There isn’t a human being associated with the PPP from the seventies until it acquired power in 1992 who would have ever conceived of a PPP Government being as vicious, cruel, violent, undemocratic, contemptuous of the working classes and arrogant and pompous as the PPP is today. And that list includes even the PPP enemies in that period. Simply put; no one would have ever believed that if you told them so in 1992.
Ralph Ramkarran has tried to explain why the PPP went wrong in a three page (yes three full pages) analysis in last Sunday Stabroek News. Unfortunately, Mr. Ramkarran falls victim to what the historian calls the syndrome of “being too close.”
When PNC and PPP stalwarts write about their respective parties, they are bound to gloss over crucial details or omit them altogether either out of sentiments or Freudian loyalty. Mr. Ramkarran’s long newspaper assessment does not do justice to scholarly analysis of the power excesses of the PPP.
This reply here (it will have to go into maybe two more columns in the coming weeks because there is so much materials in the PPP’s evolution to assess) is an attempt to touch the polemical chords that Mr. Ramkarran chose not to put his fingers on. For the purpose of this discussion, the section of Mr. Ramkarran’s thesis that is relevant is titled, “Failure to Strengthen Measures to improve Governance and Transparency.”
This aspect of Mr. Ramkarran’s analysis is woefully inadequate and shuts out the historical pathways the PPP took after the split with Mr. Burnham in the fifties that today can be cited for the levels of abomination we see in governance.
Mr. Ramkarran located the blame for the present bad governance in two factors. One is the fall of world socialism led to the PPP having to deal with the reality of a capitalist world economy and its imposition on Guyana and this led the PPP away from its socialist mooring.
Secondly, after 1992 a business class integrated itself into the PPP thus vitiating its working class physiology.
On both levels, Mr. Ramkarran falls down. First, a socialist government facing IMF impositions does not have to abandon its working class base. “Lulu” in Brazil ran a capitalist economy but did not neglect the welfare of the masses. In Scandinavia, the labouring classes are the recipients of a fair distribution of the national wealth under capitalist governments.
This still leaves the question as to why the PPP did not look after its traditional base after 1992. This answer will be in a forthcoming column. Suffice it to say the PPP is not a working class party. I now turn my attention to Ramkarran’s theory of a relentless business class shifting the PPP from its traditional class alignments
From the time the Burnham-Jagan schism rocked British Guiana the PPP entered into association and developed close relationship with the rich Indian strata. Apart from the money it got from GAWU, the PPP preserved its financial existence from the propertied and land-owning Indian classes.
The natural choice for Minister of Agriculture after 1992 was Reepu Daman Persaud because as the most popular Hindu pandit from the seventies onwards, he served as the conduit between the PPP and the wealthy Hindu community.
Space does not allow for the elaboration of these two factors. I will expand on them in another article. This analysis cannot end without a brief note on the authoritarian culture the PNC and PPP were born into which will form the backbone of my follow up column. The PNC will again become authoritarian if it gets back into power. The PPP will remain an oligarchic autocracy if it continues in government. The reason is that both of them are victims of the political culture they were born into and that inheres in both of them.

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