Dictatorship does not recognize mistakes

Mar 12, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Clement Rohee as the chairman of the event at last Sunday’s death anniversary of Cheddi Jagan in Berbice said that the PPP knows the mistakes it made that cost it the parliamentary majority and that would not happen in the next elections.
I honestly believe that given my poverty background, I should be the last person to comment on the lack of intellectual depth in another human being, therefore I apologize if what I am about to write in the next line comes over as chauvinistic.
I do not believe Clement Rohee has or will acquire, soon, the capacity to intellectually understand the mistakes of the PPP that caused it to lose a majority in the last general elections. The party did get the largest single bloc of votes.
I don’t want to single out Mr. Rohee only. I don’t believe Donald Ramotar can do so too.
It is beyond the collective leadership of the PPP to comprehend the magnitude of its erroneous ways. The political theorists have an explanation for it – dictatorship cannot mend its ways. If rulers with authoritarian instincts could have faced the reality of wrong paths chosen, history would have completely, not partially, but completely different from what it is the past hundreds of years.
George Bush Jnr, made an Obama victory possible. Despite a gargantuan screen in front of his face showing him that the American people and the world wanted less war, Bush wanted more war. If Bush had turned away from his disastrous policies and had come across as someone who learnt his mistakes, maybe Obama’s aura would not have glowed so phenomenally.
Cuba remains a poor economy because Fidel Castro is so massive a chauvinist and narcissist that he refused to see the light decades ago.
We don’t have to travel all over the world to learn how foolish autocrats are. President Forbes Burnham literally and scientifically kept Cheddi Jagan alive to the point where Jagan could easily have toppled him. Comparing the two men, Burnham was millions of miles smarter and intellectually wiser but recognizing his mistakes was Burnham’s untergang.
Burnham would listen when you tell him about his mistakes but in the end he didn’t recognize that what you were talking about were his mistakes.
For every error Burnham refused to acknowledge, Jagan’s power base grew stronger. A powerful policeman with political experience told Hoyte that it was too early to hold free elections because the PPP would win. Hoyte was advised by several close friends to do popular things then hold the free poll. Hoyte didn’t listen.
Look at the tragedy that Guyana is today, maybe a country beyond redemption, simply because Forbes Burnham and Desmond refused to see the wrong directions in which they went.
Clement Rohee is the PPP leader that spoke about the mistakes the PPP made, not Ramotar and PPP kings, so let us stick with Rohee. I can anticipate what Rohee would say if you were to ask him to enumerate these mistakes. Here goes.
The PPP didn’t do sufficient work in Berbice. The PPP didn’t do sufficient work among African Guyanese. The PPP’s management team made logistical errors. The PPP didn’t counter the opposition’s lies.
Rohee is too intellectually daft, maybe dishonest, to see that these were not the reasons the PPP lost. Rohee will not and cannot acknowledge the mistakes his party leadership made.
Here is just a sample of the mistakes the PPP made that cost it the parliamentary majority in the last election and that it will be unable to correct because dictatorship does not accept that it makes mistakes.
A person in the AFC’s leadership told me that a well placed businessman knows that the asking price for a newly built house by a female in the corridors of power is one million American dollars. If you know this female’s recent political evolution, there is no way she could have afforded that construction.
On reading this, Rohee will dismiss it. It is propaganda against the PPP. The swimming pools in the compound of the mansions are propaganda in the minds of Rohee and other PPP princes.
Is it not a mistake when sugar workers have to strike for basic things while some young “white boys” from abroad were paid, as late as 2011, US$3 million monthly. Does Rohee believe that he and his party could counter that opposition lie? They cannot because it isn’t a lie.
It is not a mistake when poor drivers have to chauffeur the new colonial leaders of Guyana from morning until the next morning from Monday to Sunday and the overtime is fixed at $15,000 a month. Isn’t that exploitation? Isn’t exploitation a wrong thing? I mean a mistake that should be corrected?

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