The PPP 2013 congress: Dictatorship versus reality

Sep 10, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Mr. Ralph Ramkarran has done an interesting analysis on the recent election that came out of the PPP congress last month. He argued that Anil Nandlall who came in fourth at the voting to select the 35-member Central Committee was not elected into the Executive Committee by that 35-member unit. Mr. Ramkarran said that there was a campaign at the congress against Mr. Nandlall.
Is the failure of Mr. Nandlall to secure a seat on the policy-making Executive a manifestation of the divorce between PPP members and a core of its leaders? If your answer is no then that answer runs into problems when you consider that Mr. Kellawan Lall brought third to last yet won a place in the Executive and is elevated in terms of authority in that he occupies a seat in the PPP Secretariat and chosen to be the editor of the party’s organ, Thunder.
Any analyst is bound to see a disconnection between the general membership and that core of leaders in that an apparatchik is placed fourth in congressional voting but is out of the policy-making body yet another party leader that lay at the bottom of the table finds a place in the executive.
This interpretation here is neither a comment on Mr. Nandlall or Mr. Lall. I simply point out the facts as the voting went. The frequent letter-writer that goes under the name M. Maxwell did an interesting statistical outlay in last Sunday KN of the voting patterns for the last three PPP congresses including 2013 and concluded that the 2013 voting results were tampered with.
If they were or were not, time is running out on the PPP for open, democratic voting from among its membership to chose its party leaders. We are in 2013; years before we reached the 21st century, this was the way party leaders were chosen. Go around the world to the most powerless parties that are not close to winning the government and they elect their leaders from among their membership.
Our neighbor, Trinidad, allowed a free vote in the UNC and the party’s leader Basdeo Panday was beaten. In the PNC, the party the PPP loves to hate, they have now incorporated the primary system where hierarchical members compete with each other. Even if you take into account the accusation by Dr. Faith Harding that her competitors were given an advantage over her candidacy, she could not have made that statement if there wasn’t an open contest.
On a related matter, Mr. Ramotar publicly acknowledged that at the congress groups of delegates sought to campaign against Mr. Jagdeo. This was good for democracy in the PPP. Mr. Jagdeo is capable of defending himself and had delegates within the congress that could have confronted the points of his detractors. But it raises the question again of a disjoint between the PPP membership and its highly centralized leadership.
The PPP would hardly have selected delegates to its congress if they were critical of the PPP. These are beneficiaries of the party and people active in the district committees. One must assume then that a negative campaign against Mr. Jagdeo did not mean a vilification of the PPP but directed against Mr. Jagdeo himself.
Surely this calls for analysis. After twelve years of the presidency and just twenty two months after his left office, there were delegates openly hostile to Mr. Jagdeo. Those critics must have identified some reasons why Mr. Jagdeo should not have been in the party’s hierarchy. It is possible that they were trying to keep Mr. Jagdeo out because they believe that he has taken the PPP far away from its original mooring?
These developments have implications when one looks at the possibility of snap poll. If the PPP dismisses the Nandlall/Lall/Jagdeo scenarios at the just concluded congress and regards Mr. Ralph Ramkarran as a disgruntled gentleman, then it will be a pattern that is so characteristic of authoritarian tradition, meaning that authoritarian leaders just cannot muster enough mental fortitude to comprehend the world around them.
There is nothing in the PPP’s chemistry to suggest that the party will reflect on what happened at the congress and internalize the lessons of history. A majority of Guyanese may be wrong in the reason they offer for the scare the PPP got when they saw the results of the 2011 election results.
The scare was there alright but the reason is another matter altogether. That core of leaders actually believes that the Indians were so assured of a PPP victory that they didn’t bother to go out to vote. Dictatorship and reality are opposites.

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The PPP 2013 congress: Dictatorship versus reality

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