Skeletons in the attic

Sep 26, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Lots of things in life are unfortunate, but when these unfortunate things happen in a poor, underdeveloped, thinly populated country like Guyana, then the misfortune becomes a disaster of immense proportion.
This was my simple, little point to the singer Dave Martins who was annoyed with Guyanese for carping about corruption, street begging and ethnic divisions when, according to Martins, he sees these negative images in the US and Canada too. There are some real asinine but powerful politicians in the US that are an embarrassment to the human race.
But for every one crazy Republican senator, you have dozens of level-headed Republican statesmen.
In Guyana, when you have a comically dangerous politician and he is powerful, the damage can be too frightening to contemplate. It started with Jagdeo. If there was a Jagdeo in the White House or in the Prime Ministerial Office in Canada, it is doubtful he could have devastated the fabric of American and Canadian society the way he eviscerated Guyana.
The US has recovered from George Bush. Will Guyana ever recover from the damage of Mr. Jagdeo? I believe it will take an extremely long time. The very foundation of Guyana has been titled by the morally and politically decadent reign of Jagdeo. So much of the fabric of Guyana has been torn by Jagdeo that the resuscitation of ethics and human decency in this country will take a long time.
Jagdeo is no longer President, but the infection is still there. Comical but powerful men still run Guyana, and they are allowed to continue with their unspeakable venalities that would never be tolerated even for fifteen minutes much less fifteen years in the US and Canada, something that Dave Martins missed completely.
Enter Clement Rohee. Here is another misfortune to have been bestowed on this poor, shambolic nation. Mr. Rohee holds a weekly press conference and each time he opens his mouth, this misfortune is on display. The opposition is overjoyed with Rohee. It is glad he is there, because for them he will help them to win the next general election. The opposition knows that his style and politics will alienate the electorate. It knows that people laugh at him; it knows that Rohee cannot compose a single line that will impress our young population.
But there is a big but. The opposition may want Rohee to continue his weekly mamaguy and you can’t blame them. But this foolish fellow is a member of a small cabal that runs the presidency of Guyana. In other words, he is as powerful as the president. You may laugh at Rohee the way Guyanese the world over derided Jagdeo, but for each mockery we heaped on Jagdeo, he got more vindictive.
Each time Jagdeo was derided, his reactive anger dented the fulcrums on which Guyana stands. The point is that Mr. Jagdeo had power and he damaged Guyana. Rohee is going to do the same as the curtain draws on the long night of the PPP’s tyranny. Journalists, commentators, analysts, opposition politicians and the lay person laughed when Rohee announced that the PPP is going into the attic and throwing out of the window onto the streets the skeletons Moses Nagamootoo is supposed to have in his closet.
What we didn’t do is to interpret what Rohee meant by skeletons. Rohee may be a court jester, but he is no congenital fool. He knows he couldn’t use the word, “mud” and include the entire opposition. Those words may have exposed him. He wanted us to read between the lines that when he named Nagamootoo, he means the opposition. And he wanted us to know that when he says he, Rohee, he means the PPP.
Skeletons then mean mud. Nagamootoo means the opposition. Rohee is the name for the PPP leadership. We are in for a morally debilitating election season, where the PPP will use every conceivable profane and fecal device to smear the opposition. These will not be skeletons coming out of the attic. This will be filth thrown from the sewers.
It is one game in town, the other being the race card. Between now and the time when the election is called, the mud will be foul-smelling. The hope is to present the opposition as people that are so vain, hypocritical and improper that they should not be elected.
It will not work, of course, because the PPP is so unpopular that even if opposition figures have gravely sinned, the society will not believe they have. But the sad thing about all of this is that a beaten, psychically destroyed society will have to endure more devastation, more damage from the Jagdeoite culture.

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Skeletons in the attic

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