State of Mind: Notes on Fazal Khan

Mar 27, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I was in the UG bus in the early seventies, and as it came to the stop sign at Lamaha Street and Vlissengen Road, I saw this young man in short pants asking the occupants if they would like to buy a newspaper. He was selling the PPP’s newspaper, Mirror.
I had no idea at the time that this gentleman and I would become close political comrades.
If there was anything about the politics of Fazal Khan, the now common-law husband of Gail Teixeira, you can say was unique in the Guyanese context was his open mind. As a PPP die-hard, Fazal never shunned a friendship with people who were critical of the PPP. After the PPP came to power, he was made manager of Guyana Airwaves Corporation (GAC).
I walked into his office one day and begged for a job for the son of one of the leading stalwarts of the WPA, Ali Majeed. Fazal never even mentioned my critical writings on the new PPP Government. He picked up the phone, made a call and the young man was employed the next day.
Fazal is dead and gone (he died last November) but you wonder why people like him ever liked the PPP. I found out why. I will come to that. I guess his relationship with Gail Teixeira (he fathered her two children) was one of the reasons he stayed in the PPP. But as the PPP Government became overbearing, he finally had to leave.
From talking to him over the years, I believe at heart he was more into the culture of the WPA than the PPP.
From 2010 up to the time of his death, we spent lots of time together. Our rendezvous would be every Sunday night at DCC in Queenstown. On several occasions, Bert Wilkinson would be part of our lime. It was from these sessions that I got wide glimpses into his personality and character but most of all, his politics.
We would sit at the bottom of the steps, he with his Banks beer, I with my Malta and under a blue tropical sky, many Sunday evenings, Fazal told me frightening stories about the nature of the PPP that raised bumps on my skin. Looking back at my life, I am so deeply sorry that President Hoyte did not rule Guyana for decades to come.
It was clear to me from those weekly interactions that Fazal Khan was a very unhappy human being. Once you talked politics with Fazal, you see the Freudian tragedies that were buried deeply in the chasms of his mind. One lovely evening, just the two us at DCC, I asked him why did he choose the PPP. And the answer was banal – Cheddi Jagan. It was the longest conversation we had at the DCC.
I got up, stood in front of him, and said, “Fazal, I am going to give you more than a hundred examples of the mischievous, narrow-minded, unpatriotic, undemocratic nature of Cheddi Jagan that are as bad as anything you see in a PNC leader and I want to hear your defence of Jagan.”
This was my forte, this was what I am good at, and I just sermonized him with the richness of contemporary Guyanese history. When I was finished, he stood silent. And all he said was, “Maybe you have a point.” This was the honesty of the man. He didn’t jump up and defend Jagan because in his mind, he knew I was sincere in what I was saying and the facts on Jagan were too graphic to ignore or deny.
Months before he died, he made a revelation that has immense political implications for the writing of Guyanese history. Fazal is dead and gone but he made an everlasting contribution to our understanding of one of Guyana’s historical shapers – Janet Jagan. There were three of us present in his home when he made his iconoclastic statement – me, Bert Wilkinson and Clerk of Parliament, Sherlock Issacs.
Fazal told us that President Janet Jagan dismissed him from the GAC general manager job because at a party conference, he stood up and openly opposed her on her nomination of Bharrat Jagdeo to what she called the A-team. An interview with the Kaieteur News was subsequently arranged and what he told us, he went public with.
I honestly believe he should have migrated from Guyana because his Freudian torment made him into an unhappy person. Fazal was permanently angered at his dismissal, the PPP leadership acceptance at what President Jagan had done him, what the PPP had become under Jagdeo and Gail Teixeira’s endorsement of Jagdeo’s politics. Space has run out. More another time.

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