The Emperor’s New Clothes: The PPP Congress today

Aug 02, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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If you put a gun to the head of a human being and ask him/her, do you hate me or love me, and the answer is the latter, then you are a hopeless moron to smile and believe the words. Those words were engineered by you to come out of the mouth of someone that you placed under duress. This is what is going to play out at the PPP’s Congress today.
The hundreds of delegates on display were selected by party leaders. Most of these people are beneficiaries of the PPP Government’s resources that it distributes in incestuous ways. They will fill the auditorium and clap their benefactors with reverberating decibels. Their silly benefactors will sincerely believe in their minds that they are popular and Indians love them. A commentator once said that East Indians do not like the PPP; it is that they don’t want the PNC in power.
The roars from these hundreds of delegates will be understood by PPP leaders to mean that they are loved as never before. This is a prime example of the Emperor and his new clothes. No PPP leader has worn those clothes more spectacularly than its infamous Emperor, Bharrat Jagdeo. Mr. Jagdeo circulated about twenty thousand persons at his Day of Appreciation and all the big election rallies in 2012. He honestly believed in his mind that this was a testimony to the hundreds of thousands that admired and valued him. There could be no greater example than the silly Emperor wearing clothes that were in fact his bare body.
A mind is an extremely dangerous thing. When a mind translates self-deception into expressions of love from others, then danger lurks. When such translated self-deception is embedded in people who are in charge of a country, then not only national nightmares, but cruel destruction will overrun such a nation. Guyana will not escape eventual destruction, because today’s Congress will re-energize the dangerous psychology that PPP leaders are prisoners of.
The PPP Congress comes at a time, when that party is facing its most disgraceful moments since Forbes Burnham left and formed the PNC about fifty-six years ago. No decent historian – except those paid by the PPP to do propaganda – would deny that the PPP has destroyed every piece of its legacy that it wore so bravely on its sleeve from 1964 until 1992.
Today, the PPP Emperors and Empresses are drowning in miasmic corruptibility, sickening immorality and absolute power madness. Their fulcrum – the East Indians in and out of Guyana – know it, feel it and are slowly rejecting everything the PPP once stood for. If the PPP calls an election tomorrow, all the AFC has to do is front three persons, just three; Ralph Ramkarran, Moses Nagamootoo and Khemraj Ramjattan, and the PPP will be reduced to a footnote. The fulcrum is weakening because the waves of Indian disappointment are sapping its base.
It would be an interesting piece of research to find out how many of those delegates from the last Congress are still in Guyana. How many from today’s show will be around for the next one? The paradise that came from the mouth of Papa Cheddi during those endless promises after 1992 is dead just like Papa Cheddi. How intriguing to note that the siblings of PPP ministers are leaving these shores non-stop. The mother of a senior minister permanently migrated early this year.
How do the psychologist and political analyst explain that in the desperate times from 1980, when Guyanese migrated in prodigious numbers, there are more Guyanese leaving this country in the 21st century? Under Burnham there was no money, not even toothpaste and toilet paper were available. Yet in today’s Guyana where shopping malls, soca festivals, chutney magic and Cheddi’s protégés are as perennial as the grass, more Guyanese are exiting than when the bad days under Mr. Burnham were unbearable.
Between the decade, 2000 and 2009, more Guyanese left than in the decade 1980 to 1989 when the PNC was in government. Maybe no analyst can explain it. Maybe it defies human logic. Thomas Carroll came in 2000 and scooped up more than US$12 million selling visas to people who were mostly PPP supporters. Now Mr. Edy Duran has reportedly taken in significantly more than that number. Berbicians rushed to Carroll and Duran.
In the Carroll days, young girls could be seen leaving his Pegasus room by the scores. Duran’s sexism exceeded Carroll’s. Go visit the Congress today and see how naked the Emperors and Empresses will be with their news clothes. Warning – it will not be a pretty sight. Sad to say an aging body does not look as attractive as an 18-year-old on the beach.

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