It is not only bad governance but bad attitudes

Jul 18, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The corruption began under the Presidency of Dr. Cheddi Jagan and continued from thereon. But in that period, it was small time skullduggery. Perhaps the greatest claim to fame that Jagan had was his personal integrity in relation to finance. Both Dr. and Mrs. Jagan did not care much for wealth accumulation and never lived ostentatiously.
It can probably be put down to their communist fanaticism. Whatever flaws the historian finds in Dr. Jagan, financial lust never existed in his long career.
Jagan tried as hard as he could to stop his protégés from stealing but he couldn’t and he died a broken-hearted man. The same for Mrs. Jagan. As failing health took over her physiology, Mrs. Jagan no longer had the mental and physical strength to intervene in the affairs of government. In the end she just gave up.
She knew that she and her husband could not have stopped their underlings from the power madness that had overtaken them. Shortly before her death, I saw her at the Oasis Café and she looked like a person that had the world on her shoulders. I kept looking at her and in all the time she was there, she didn’t even give off an intestinal smile. Like her husband, Mrs. Jagan left this world a disenchanted human.
It was not only a creeping corruption that deflated Dr. Jagan after 1992, it was the hubris and hauteur that had taken over the little boys and girls that had come to be the new administrators of government. Cheddi Jagan was a fantastically modest man. I will always remember the words of the great Moses Bhagwan after Jagan’s death.
In speaking of the qualities of Jagan, Bhagwan wrote that at a central committee meeting of the PPP, Dr. Jagan was under fierce criticism for a bad policy mistake. Bhagwan recalled that Jagan just stood reticent while his critics spoke.
The unbelievable arrogance of PPP leaders since 1992 has no parallel in the history of this country. From the colonial officials right through to the twenty-eight years of PNC rule, there was nothing in those administrations that could match or even come close to the pomposity displayed by the PPP Government since 1992 with two exceptions – Dr. Jagan himself and Minister of Trade, Michael Shree Chand.
This columnist lived under the PNC Government and it is simply a distortion of history to say that the PNC leaders were arrogant.
They never were. From Forbes Burnham to Dr. Ptolemy Reid to Hamilton Green right down to the Ministers and Permanent Secretaries, they hogged power alright, they were authoritarian in their power display alright but at the level of administration, they were very pleasant people. It was if the PNC knew they were carrying a burden so they wanted to come across as nice guys. Sociology also explains this comparison.
The African middle class had a different evolution from the East Indians. The role of Scottish Masonic lodges in the shaping of the African middle class personality may be another explanatory factor. Even though Desmond Hoyte had a short fuse, he was a cultured, middle class man that came across as cultivated and well mannered. The PPP in power is the exact opposite of the PNC when the PNC ruled.
It simply boggles the mind how PPP leaders can be so stupid as not to see that if you connect bad governance with bad attitudes, then you are giving people a reason to hate you.
At a commonsensical level why not mask your bad governance with good attitudes? This is what the PNC leaders were smart enough to do. There was a whole school of PNC leaders who came across as extraordinarily nice people. Lloyd Searwar said that once you entered Burnham’s office, you left a convert.
Things got pretty nasty under Jagdeo. Mr. Jagdeo seemed to have taken a macabre delight in his Ministers and bureaucrats mistreating people. If you take away the racial tribalism that surfaces at election time, a vast majority of Guyanese in and out this country do not like the PPP and when you talk to them, they inevitably tell you about how pompous the PPP power-wielders are.
As soon as you speak to a villager in a predominantly Indian community, the talk is about the attitude of the PPP governors. They may not mention corruption, they may not mention bad governance but they always zero in on the brusque and brash manner with which PPP leaders and PPP appointed bureaucrats administer the affairs of state in Guyana. Could it be that these people hate the Guyanese nation?

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