Cabinet Secretary defends Jagdeo’s sanctioned Babu Jaan comments

Apr 16, 2015 News

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After the Media Monitoring Unit’s (MMU) public sanctioning of comments made by former president Bharrat Jagdeo, Cabinet Secretary, Dr. Roger Luncheon, has come out in defence of Jagdeo’s “racially divisive” language.

During his weekly post-Cabinet press briefing at the Office of the President, Dr. Luncheon, expressed Cabinet’s concern about what he referred to as “inference” by the MMU about impact of Jagdeo’s public address at Babu Jaan, Port Mourant, last month.
Last week the MMU made public its first report on the media’s coverage of the election campaign where it addressed the public outcry over Jagdeo’s delivery at a Memorial Ceremony held for former President and founder of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), Dr. Cheddi Jagan.
The report on the March 1 to March 31 period, focused on part of Jagdeo’s speech which it noted stirred significant negative public reactions.
It also noted that Jagdeo’s delivery at the Corentyne, Berbice memorial site, had been broadcast on the National Communications Network (NCN), the MMU said that this opened the way for it to address the matter.
The controversial part of the speech reads, “They (the opposition) shout about racism of the PPP, but they practise racism… In the last elections they went to some of the Afro- Guyanese villages and beat some drums at 6 o’clock in the morning and say let us throw out these coolie people. Get up, go out and vote, throw out the coolie people. That’s the kind of language they use. Anybody from our party who uses that sort of language, we will kick them out. This is our approach.”
The MMU report stated that “at close up, he was speaking in a known PPP/C stronghold, before a predominantly East Indian audience, and, to boot, in a highly-charged political and ethnic environment.”
It added, “Taking into consideration the historically and politically influenced divisions that persist up to now between Africans and East Indians in this country, and which are usually more pronounced during elections periods, the Unit came to the conclusion that the anecdotal illustration used by Dr. Jagdeo to make his point about racism, boomeranged disastrously, since it came over as a calculated exploitation, for political purposes, of the known fears and insecurities of one section of the population – East Indians.”
Additionally the Unit wrote within its foregoing context, its conclusion that the remarks made by the former president “were racially divisive and should have been edited by all sections of the media that broadcast or printed the remarks verbatim.”
According to Dr. Luncheon, while Cabinet acknowledged that the statements were indeed made at the Berbice event, he explained that Jagdeo simply “disclosed” statements that were previously made by “others”, alluding to parties outside the current People’s PPP administration.
Dr. Luncheon said that Jagdeo then defended himself by saying that were such statements made by any member of the PPP/C administration, that individual would be kicked out immediately.
The Cabinet Secretary regarded the conclusion by the MMU as inferences and deemed it an illogical conclusion on the part of the Unit. “The ejection from membership could hardly, in a logical way, lead to an inference that those remarks were racially divisive,” Dr Luncheon said.
“In this case the statements that the (former) President made were undisputedly statements accredited to others.” He explained that the statements were a disclosure of how the PPP Administration would treat any member of the party who made similar utterances.
Dr. Luncheon was then asked if Cabinet took into consideration that Jagdeo’s statements weren’t repeated anywhere else or were never reported by anyone prior to the March 8 address at Babu Jaan.
“I would want to be at odds because what was unveiled at Cabinet was that those statements allegedly made by an AFC TV Personality were the substance of formal submissions to GECOM.
“I was even told that the attention of the police had been invited formally by the governing party about those statements. So I have reason to feel that those statements were not made and died, until resurrected by Jagdeo at the Babu Jaan event.
“They had already entered into the mainstream of condemnation by the governing party and I suspect others too in the people of Berbice.”
As the MMU is a creation of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Dr Luncheon expressed the opinion that the Unit should not be acting independent of the Commission. “It is felt that their output must and needs to be drawn to GECOM’s attention prior to its publication,” stated the Cabinet Secretary.

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