The art of leadership

Jan 04, 2015 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

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President Donald Ramotar seems to have lost, or never to have learnt, the art of leadership. His apprenticeship for the presidency was short and hasty. His selection as the People’s Progressive Party’s presidential candidate for the 2011 general elections was the product of the patronage of former President, Bharat Jagdeo. The candidate was given a crash course in statesmanship by his patron, who belatedly appointed him a presidential ‘adviser’ only seven months before the election. This was his exposure to governmental administration and international relations.
Ramotar’s leadership experience was derived from his service as office manager and executive secretary at the party headquarters for twelve years. He was elevated to the PPP general-secretaryship after Cheddi Jagan’s death in 1997 and remained immured in Freedom House for the next fourteen years.
Ramotar was therefore considered a ‘safe’ apparatchik who could maintain, if not manage, Jagdeo’s complicated business portfolio. On becoming president, he proceeded dutifully to reappoint 15 members of Jagdeo’s Cabinet. He missed the opportunity to take the lead in confronting the country’s serious social, economic and political problems or even to define the character of his administration.
Ramotar, for his part, gave a public assurance that Jagdeo’s services would still be required after he had demitted office and Jagdeo himself boasted that he would be “actively involved in the government.” This was not a good omen. The public perception was that Ramotar’s tenure would be a continuation of Jagdeo’s controversial rule.
Ramotar then bizarrely demonstrated just how much like Jagdeo he had become. He chose the occasion of the solemn, annual commemoration ceremony for Cheddi and Janet Jagan, at Babu John, Corentyne, to inveigh against those he described as “haters of the government and the People’s Progressive Party Civic.” He insulted his former, long-standing colleague Moses Nagamootoo for comments made about Guyana’s debt, “referring to him as “the jackass Nagamootoo.”
The presidency, clearly, had reached a really low cultural level. Ramotar’s style, perhaps, betrays his admiration for his predecessor’s penchant for political invective. It was inspired also by his own five-year (1983-88) sojourn in Prague, in the Czech Socialist Republic, on the staff of the Marxist-Leninist journal “Problems of Peace and Socialism.” This had been preceded by a one-year (1972-73) crash course in “political science” in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Ramotar seems never to have lost the antagonistic, dogmatic and pedantic Soviet-style of propaganda which was inculcated in political pupils forty years ago at the height of the ‘cold war.’
Ramotar’s ‘feral blast’ at Aishalton Village, therefore, was not unexpected. He expressed exactly his own personality and the attitude of the People’s Progressive Party Civic administration towards citizens of this country. The ‘Aishalton incident,’ which occurred on 3rd December 2014, explains why our political culture has deteriorated so rapidly over the last fifteen years under presidents Bharrat Jagdeo and Donald Ramotar; why the public has lost respect for the President; why ordinary Guyanese no longer have much confidence in the government and why there have been so many public protests against political and governmental officials all around the country.
The President was recorded at Aishalton Village in the Rupununi Region as saying to a member of the audience at a meeting: “You don’t know anything about Jagdeo. If he been here, he might a slap you, coz (because) you stupid.” Shortly after, John Adams, a 29-year-old secondary school teacher was accosted by members of the Presidential Guard and told to stop heckling the President while he was speaking. Adams refused and “he was slapped repeatedly by the guards.”
The ‘Aishalton incident’ was not isolated. Ramotar, over the past three years, has degraded the high office of President of the Republic with his invective and vituperative language. The frequency and vulgarity of his offensive statements against certain persons, and in public places, suggest that there is a deeper disdain and reckless disregard both for the Presidency and the people. He has brought the entire nation into disrepute. His own crass, coarse and crude choices of words in his public statements have been a major cause of the collapse of confidence. His boorishness seems now seems to be ‘natural.
Ramotar, as the PPP general secretary, told the party’s 30th Congress in August 2013 at Port Mourant, on the Corentyne Coast, that he always knew that Moses Nagamootoo was “a man with a flawed character who had a penchant for opportunism.” Earlier, during the election campaign in November 2011, he had told a rally at Whim Village on the Corentyne Coast:  “[Moses] Nagamootoo is like a dog lunging at his shadow; at his reflection! He was expecting Ramjattan to make him Vice-President! Ramjattan is a puppet! Ramjattan is a sham…So, if Nagamootoo think that Ramjattan gon make him Vice-President, Lauraah!
Ramotar is also careless with the truth. He falsely claimed that Leader of the Opposition, David Granger, had knowledge of 155 weapons that went missing from the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) while he was the Commander, after being issued to the People’s National Congress (PNC) Government in the 1970s. He said, further, “….When those weapons were given to the PNC, the present leader of the PNC was the commander of the army at the time. And now that he is the leader of the PNC, I would expect that he would make a genuine effort to return the weapons that were given to the PNC.”
Ramotar has ministerial responsibility for defence and, if indeed, he had evidence that Granger was involved in the alleged illicit transfer of weapons, he now has the power to initiate an investigation.
The President probably thinks that he is still in Prague as he was thirty years ago. He should realise, however, that his provocative language has badly damaged political, social and racial relations in present-day Guyana.

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