Carl Greenidge’s reflection: A response

Aug 22, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Mr. Carl Greenidge writing over the weekend about the secret land deals the Government has made with foreign companies wrote the following; “…you would have thought that after the furor over the procurement irregularities of the so-called Specialty Hospital the Government would move very carefully….”  Mr. Greenidge went on to enumerate the perpetuation of this morbidity of secrecy.
What Mr. Greenidge has written in that letter comes out of the mouths of literally countless citizens of this country. They would ask what kind of leaders the PPP has when last week they got exposed for an illegal transaction then the next day the government does the identical crime and they go on and on.
There are two reasons for such a culture within dictatorships. One explanation is theoretical, the other is specific to the PPP, but both factors are intricately intertwined. First, from time immemorial, when in a primitive society, members of the community broke the rules of sharing and were allowed to keep more than they were entitled to, these people grew bolder.
Marxist theory posits that this is the way capital accumulation and class exploitation started, that is, after the resources were pooled and some hunters took more than they were entitled to, they used the surplus to enslave others. It is an inevitability in human nature that if excesses, greed and criminality are not confronted and wrong-doers punished, then inequality leads to enslavement.
This story of uncontrolled power is as old as civilization itself. If another American president tries to start a war and he/she is not checked by Congress, then that president will drag the US into more wars. If a cricketer says that no Guyanese is in the Test squad and he must play and the selectors bow to his demand, Jamaicans, Barbadians and other nationalities will do it. If a judge is dating a litigant before him and his superiors turn a blind eye, he will continue his behaviour.
This is the story of civilization. This is the story of unchecked power. It will be with us forever, but we may not have another Hitler or “sweet boy” judge once we are willing to confront illegal, immoral behaviour. The record since World War II, the founding of the United Nations, the spread of democracy, and the fight against racism and abuse of women, have led to lesser evil in the exercise of power. But it is always lurking.
We now bring that paradigm to Guyana. Things went badly after the PNC lost energy and steam during the post-2001 election protest. Mr. Hoyte passed away, the PNC lost interest in power and Mr. Jagdeo used the Buxton violence syndrome to corrupt the police. By 2005, the police, the drug men and the power of Mr. Jagdeo had gone out of control. The rule of law broke down.  Mr. Jagdeo consolidated his oligarchic system. Adding to Mr. Jagdeo’s empire was the ethnic protection he received from the race game.
The situation has been the same since then. What happened after 2005 was that the latitude that Mr. Jagdeo accumulated brought an enormous inflation to his ego, confidence and psychology. Mr. Jagdeo felt that he had more space to manoeuvre than any other leader in Guyana’s history, and he was right. The irony and ignominy of the present Rodney Commission is that it puts on display President Burnham’s authoritarian character while hiding the curtailment of power Burnham endured because there was a radical WPA, an indomitable PPP, a relentless East Indian population and a vibrant civil society.
Mr. Jagdeo’s tyrannical space was larger than the three great rivers of Guyana. There was no resurgent African ethnic community, no energetic PNC, no concerned civil society. By the time he won the 2006 elections, Mr. Jagdeo had monarchial power the English –speaking Caribbean never saw even in colonial times. It calls one’s scholarship into question if one asserts that the colonial governor and Burnham exercised more unfettered authority than Jagdeo.
So crazy and wild was the power that Mr. Jagdeo held that nothing unbelievably horrible in the vocabulary of Mr. Jagdeo, his close confidantes and the PPP party itself was shunned. Mr. Jagdeo and his entourage said and did the unthinkable, with perhaps the incident between Mr. Jagdeo and his common-law wife, Varshnie Singh, being the most repugnant anywhere in the world at the time.
In such a situation, the President and the PPP felt they could have signed any deal, sold any resource and sacked any Guyanese they wished to. The Jagdeoite culture is in the halls of power, even though Mr. Jagdeo is no longer the president. This then explains why the PPP will not stop its tyranny unless we stop it.

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