Mohammed Morsi, the PPP Government and golden toilets

Jul 03, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

At the time of writing, it is unlikely that the legally-elected president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi, will survive the social contract that he and the population of Egypt agreed to when he was voted in. It looks like he will have to go.
The great social contract theorists in philosophy – Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Locke – have differed in the latitude allowed to each partner in the contract. Hobbes assigned more power to the leader whom he felt needed some form of maximum power. Rousseau took a more romantic but impractical road.
He wanted the people to be directly involved in the delineation of policies. Locke felt that the leader must be subject to parliamentary oversight with more power being assigned to the judiciary.
There was, however, one gigantic, striking similarity between the three men – the social contract must never be one-sided. It must involve the agreement of both parties and if the leader cannot dispense justice to the other party, the other party is morally right to remove him.
This was pellucid in the writing of all three philosophers. It means, then, that in the philosophy of the social contract, the leader has never been assigned unlimited, unaccountable power. It means then that in the philosophy of the social contract, a population has the right to demand the removal of the leader if he breaks the covenant.
Morsi broke the social contract. He was foolish to do so. Had there been no revolution, there would have been no Morsi presidency. He took the people for granted. He assumed power and became like the Leviathan that Hobbes wrote about. But Morsi, if he had read Hobbes, would have seen that the great philosopher accepted the rebellion of the people against the Leviathan.
Not thankful that a revolution brought him to power, Morsi began to behave like Hosni Mubarak that the revolution toppled. His policies smacked of the authoritarian mentality. He ruled as if he was the president of his party not Egypt. Morsi began a creeping Islamization of Egypt that the people didn’t want.
In no other country in the world at the moment is the Morsi error more graphic than Guyana. David Hinds said on television recently that rejection of the PPP hegemony does not have to involve violence. And it need not. But Hinds stressed that there must be demonstrative action.
In no other country in the world has the social contract been so violated than in Guyana. Where to start in the enumeration of the PPP’s violations becomes a task as easy as looking at the palm of your hand.
We can start three weeks ago with the dismissal of over a dozen workers for purportedly failing a lie detector test. There is no law in Guyana that allows the State to dismiss an employee for failing a polygraph. But it happened three weeks ago at CANU and the Guyanese opposition and people accepted it.
It happened three weeks ago again and it will continue to happen. From the polygraph abomination we can go straight into the era of golden toilets in Guyana.
On Monday I dropped in at Kaieteur News and I was greeted with the comment; “Freddie yuh gat fuh write on dis.” A few of my KN colleagues showed me the front page for the Monday issue with the photograph of two toilet sets going respectively for $22,000 and $33,000 on the Guyana market.
Leonard Gildarie swung around in his chair and asked me how much I paid for my toilet sets when I was building my home in 2007. I told him none cost more than twenty thousand dollars.
I don’t think I am worth reading as a columnist if I did not print an opinion on the era of golden toilets in Guyana in my column. I don’t think any citizen of this country should remain silent on the toilet scandal where the Guyana Government has agreed to pay almost half million dollars for one set of toilet seats and is buying 69 of them.
The question is why would any politician agree to such a contract? For me there is only one answer – corruption.
Where and when are these scandals going to end? My answer is that the violations of the social contract are going to continue if we do not bring the Arab Spring to this land.
The nightmare has taken on macabre dimensions when you think that the social contract in Guyana is between the population and a minority government, a minority regime that behaves as if it won the last general elections. It did not!

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Mohammed Morsi, the PPP Government and golden toilets

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