A guy walks into a bar…

May 19, 2013 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

---

 

 

Donald Rabindranauth Ramotar enjoyed an easy and effortless entry into the Presidency of the Republic of Guyana. His emergence as the People’s Progressive Party’s presidential candidate for the 2011 general elections, however, did not hint that his path would be as difficult as it has turned out to be.
Donald Ramotar has walked into a bar. His tenure of office has been beset by barriers, obstacles and stumbling blocks over the last year and a half, but his most menacing problems have arisen out of the PPP’s own recondite rituals. The public perception is that his nomination as the PPP’s presidential candidate was the product of the patronage of former President, Bharat Jagdeo, who belatedly appointed him a presidential ‘adviser,’ seven months before the election, to give him exposure to governmental administration and international relations.
Ramotar – office manager and executive secretary at the party headquarters for twelve years –had been elevated to the PPP General-Secretaryship after the death of Cheddi Jagan in 1997. He was considered a ‘safe’ apparatchik who could maintain, if not manage, Jagdeo’s complicated investment portfolio. Jagdeo’s protégés enabled the deferral of the potentially problematic 30th congress and sidelined Ramotar’s most ambitious and vociferous rivals –Ralph Ramkarran and Moses Nagamootoo.
These manoeuvres guaranteed Ramotar the party’s presidential candidacy. The general elections were a different matter. The PPPC’s electoral support had been on the skids as a result, largely, of Jagdeo’s wild style of governance. Jagdeo inherited a tally of about 220,000 votes in 1997, but managed to reduce it to 210,000 in 2001 and, further, to 183,000 in 2006. Ramotar continued the downward trend by dropping to 166,000 votes in 2011, at the cost of the party’s majority in the National Assembly. The message from the masses seems not to have been understood.
Ramotar then walked into another bar. He reappointed 15 members of Jagdeo’s Cabinet and only managed to appoint five ‘newish’ faces. He missed the opportunity to enlist fresh talent to confront the country’s serious economic and social problems or even to define the character of his administration. The public perception was that his tenure would simply be a continuation of Jagdeo’s controversial rule. Ramotar, for his part, gave a public assurance that Jagdeo’s services would still be required after he had demitted office and Jagdeo himself boasted that he would be “actively involved in the government.” This was not a good omen.
The first impressions were that leadership problems had started to hamper the administration. It was only after a 10-week delay that Ramotar finally declared open the First Session of the Tenth Parliament of Guyana in February 2012. The defining ‘Speech from the Throne’ was vacuous. It came at a time of floods, restlessness by sugar and bauxite workers; turmoil among staff, students and workers at the University; piracy, police brutality and collapsing sea defences. The new president had somehow contrived to ignore the issues about which the common people had hoped to hear.
Ramotar continued on this course, de-motivating every significant section of the working class – nurses, teachers, public servants and sugar workers. He studiously avoided references to the soaring cost-of-living, the growth of the horde of homeless and destitute people, the increasing number of armed robberies and other violent crimes and rising unemployment and poverty.
Ramotar then bizarrely displayed just how much like Jagdeo he had become. He chose the occasion of the solemn, annual commemoration ceremony for Cheddi and Janet Jagan, at Babu John, Corentyne, to inveigh against those he described as “haters of the government and the People’s Progressive Party Civic.” He insulted his former, long-standing colleague Moses Nagamootoo for comments made about Guyana’s debt, “referring to him as “the jackass Nagamootoo.” The presidency had reached a really low cultural level.
Ramotar walked into an ideological wilderness by trying to invoke the name of Cheddi Jagan, who most living Guyanese have never seen, and an ideology which they cannot comprehend. Recalling, perhaps, his five-year sojourn in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on the staff of the Marxist-Leninist journal “Problems of Peace and Socialism,” he recounted how Cheddi Jagan had to fight “right-wing and left-wing opportunism,” whatever that meant to the present generation!
The People’s Progressive Party will convene its twice-postponed 30th Congress on 2nd-4th August in what used to be known as the party’s ‘heartland’ – the East Berbice-Corentyne Region. The PPP will also face its worst leadership crisis in 20 years but, as usual, Congress will decide nothing. The important decisions will be made by the Central Committee. The iron law of democratic centralism – more centralistic than democratic – will prevail.
Donald Ramotar, regardless of the outcome, is walking into yet another bar. He must realise by now that his administration is stalling. He cannot proceed on the path he has taken over the past eighteen months without causing the country greater pain.

 

---

---