Placating mechanism or election gimmick?

Sep 17, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The talk on the street is that the free transportation to commuters in sections of Region Three by the Government is an election gimmick. It is naïve for anyone to think that the Government leaders suddenly got hit by the Road to Damascus fever and have become generous to the Guyanese people.
In all my years as a political activist and academic analyst, the PPP Government, maybe with the exception of Cheddi Jagan (but it was Jagan who cancelled duty free cars for UG lecturers in 1995), has been the most uncaring and insensitive post-colonial regime in the British West Indies.
I will argue in any international forum that the PPP is far less socialist than any administration in the CARICOM region from the sixties to now. Even Tom Adams of Barbados, Eugenia Charles of Dominica, and Bruce Golding of Jamaica, who were avowed free market advocates, had a more realistic approach to working class conditions. Someone like Edward Seaga, in Jamaica, was far more a working class sympathizer, even though he was a more neo-liberal leader than Bharrat Jagdeo and Donald Ramotar.
Under the present cabal which is a Jagdeoite formation (there is one Ramotar creation in power since he became President and if you find one he/she had their discovery under Jagdeo) ,there is a ruthless approach to economics with a shameless partisanship to big business, the nouveau riche class and the wealthy strata in general.
The Jagdeo/Ramotar combination is the most pro-capitalist government CARICOM history has produced. The Jagdeo/Ramotar pact would make some right-wing, neo-liberal European Prime Ministers look like activists of the FARC in Colombia.
Why all of a sudden, this government has become generous to working class commuters? The free transport is administered by a Minister who reminds one of the apartheid system in South Africa. For years now, this man’s Ministry has been chasing poor vendors off the public parapets (not pavements in Georgetown) around Guyana, vendors that you would find in abundant supply in most capitalist countries in Europe. In New York such vendors proliferate.
In my archives I must have done five articles on this atrocity. Up to two weeks ago, I saw this Minister’s Ministry chasing a female teenager from the parapet. She was selling manufactured bottle water. I was so incensed and with the invocations of memories of apartheid, I intervened with a maddening aggression.
Suddenly this man loves poor people and is elated to provide free transport for working class commuters.
This freeness has come just weeks before the Government will be forced to resign after a no-confidence motion in Parliament. Isn’t the timing obvious? But though it appears to be an election goody, I see the context differently. I am convinced that the PPP will not accept the no-confidence vote and call elections three months after.
Two strategies the PPP will adopt. One is to ask the Chief Justice to rule that the no-confidence motion is a violation of what the Constitution stipulates. The PNC and AFC have to be stupid to contest that writ. Secondly, since the writ will be ignored by the AFC and PNC, the PPP will stay in office with the excuse that it is waiting for the ruling by the Chief Justice.
My opinion is that the court’s decision will be long after the three-month period is up.
In the meantime, an enraged PNC and AFC will be on the warpath persuading the population to reject an illegal government. It is in this context, I see the transportation freeness. The Government will pile on more goodies as we get nearer to that no-confidence vote.
The objective is to appear as a caring, generous regime with the hope that the people will reject the post-vote anger of the AFC and PNC.
I agree that I may be splitting hairs here. Even if the coming goodies are intended to placate the population and get them to ignore the illegal nature of the PPP in power, a general election is inevitable before November 2016 when it is constitutionally due, barring any no-confidence vote.
Therefore someone can argue that the generosity will in the end become an election strategy.
I am not contradicting myself here. I can see the point of a critic saying that placating or no placating, the freeness is tied to the inevitability of elections. But the analyst has to be concerned with causal factors. I am contending that the planning of these free things is essentially to make the PPP cabal look good in the face of anger by the opposition that will soon be unleashed on what the opposition will call an illegal government.

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Placating mechanism or election gimmick?

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