I detected the non-existence of Donald Ramotar decades ago

Nov 01, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I have known Glenn Lall years before he became the owner of the Kaieteur News. In fact, when he birthed the idea of publishing a newspaper, he consulted me. He introduced me to one of his financial backers as we ate on his lawn.
As the newspaper became bigger and bigger I became louder and louder in my advice to Glenn that he should keep away from any intimate, overlapping friendship with men and women with state power. He knew that I meant the PPP. Newspapers and political power are bound to clash. The pen is mightier than the sword. There will always be a conflict between people with power and people with ideas.
The very first big quarrel I had with Glenn was over Donald Ramotar in 2010. Before 2010, Glenn and I would have our usual disagreements which are inevitable between a columnist and his/her publisher. That is the nature of the media. I had it with Fr Andrew Morrison at the Catholic Standard and with David De Caires at the Stabroek News.
The 2010 incident is gone. It concerned Ramotar’s son, Alexei, hitting my nephew and breaking his leg in a car accident in Kitty. No need lamenting what is gone and dead but I could have seen in Donald Ramotar what Glenn could not. That was understandable. I have been a political activist and a student of philosophy my entire life. I knew Donald Ramotar in ways Glenn did not.
I knew Donald Ramotar from being comrades in political struggle. I knew Ramotar from studying and writing about the politics of my country. Glenn on the other hand, had a deep family connection to Ramotar.
In 2014 in one of the most notorious scandals in Guyana’s political history, a tape in which (not the alleged voice but) the emanations of the Attorney-General constitute horrible expressions of political desires have been greeted with the most shocking embrace and support from the President of Guyana.
But who living in Guyana was surprised? Certainly not me. Donald Ramotar and I are contemporaries in age and political activism. I have known the man a long, long time. He has always been a self-effacing person, always in the back seat when the debate gets volcanic; always silent when Jagan needed a proliferation of ideas from his protégés; always smiling but never coming forward.
And the reason for this is because genetically, Ramotar is not a political animal. He must have entered politics not out of political biology but out of a sentimental attraction to an orator. It happens all the time with us. The famous movie star, Gweneth Paltrow, said she looked at Obama and simply fell for him.
Albert Speer was inexplicably captivated by Hitler. Young men and women just looked at Walter Rodney and preferred him over Forbes Burnham. Many young people tell me that they are struck by the presence of Nigel Hughes.
The orator was Cheddi Jagan and so Donald Ramotar entered politics and has been in politics since then. But Ramotar lacks all the qualities a politician should have. In fact, Ramotar has no leadership qualities at all. The Nandlall tape controversy shows that he has none and doesn’t want to have any.
The most depressing thing about the evolution of Donald Ramotar is that he became the President. In the three years he has been the President, there has been a sordid absence of thinking or even the possession of a mere idea that was original or unique from him.
Donald Ramotar doesn’t have ideas on politics. He never did; he never will.
I have no research material to go but I believe Ramotar never intended to become the President of Guyana. Cheddi and Janet Jagan never saw him as a thinker or doer and had no interest in putting him in positions of sensitivity. They knew his pleasant personality was what the party needed now that it was in power where all the thinkers and doers were transferred to the government.
The Jagans made him General-Secretary of the PPP. Janet made him second to her in running the party newspaper, The Mirror. The Jagans knew that he was limited and that his place was party politics. That is why Rupert Roopnaraine ridiculed him during the 2011 election campaign with the slogan, “No Place for Donald.”
Political observers knew that the PPP top brass saw him only as a person to run the party while the PPP ran the government.
It was Jagdeo who in a fit of terrible fear of the next PPP president pushed through a nasty piece of Hitlerite politics and ordered the PPP to make Ramotar the 2011 presidential candidate. Jagdeo knew the man. I knew the man. Glenn didn’t.

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I detected the non-existence of Donald Ramotar decades ago

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