Here is how you can tell a country is dead

May 02, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The People Progressive Party is asking voters to elect them a sixth consecutive time. This party was first elected in 1992. From 1992 to April 2015, Guyana has seen venalities, depravities, immoralities and degradation of sacred values never before seen in the British West Indies, will never be tolerated in any other Caricom state and which are hardly replicated in today’s world.
Yet, save for this columnist, when he was at UG, there has not been even one published paper on the nature of power and its attendant abominations from any academic at the University of Guyana. There has been not even one seminar at the UG or outside of UG on the nature of governance in this country.
Such an atrocity is simply unbelievable. In which other country, university academics refuse to hold public seminars or have lunch-time debates on politics in their country. I was at UG for twenty-six years and one day you may see a notice of a seminar on “the use of mercury in the mining industry,” “the hibernation of rabbits,” “the life-span of donkeys,” but never a paper on power and politics.
In Guyana, unaccountable power has virtually reduced this country to a failed state. Uncontrolled power has chased away scores of thousands since 1999 with 14 persons leaving daily for the US alone. Unrestrained power continues to engender racial divisions. Excessive power has extirpated our human resources. Immoral exercise of power has fed the flames of unprecedented corruption that has put Guyana in the league of the most corrupt states in the world.
Yet, there hasn’t been a single academic paper that a high school student or young boy or girl can take off the shelf and read an interpretation of why these tragedies have happened. The Guyana Historical and Research Society in June, every year, holds a four-hour academic conference at the National Library. Except for this writer, there has never been even one paper from someone else on the exercise of power by the PPP government.
Mr. Jagdeo was the president for twelve years. That is equivalent to three American presidential terms. Mr. Jagdeo has single-handedly remolded the political history of Guyana. Every mockery of politics existed during his tenure.
After the hegemonic debaucheries of Bharrat Jagdeo people feel it is unfair to talk about Mr. Burnham’s authoritarian style.
Mr. Burnham’s style of governorship is gone from our lips and minds after twelve years of Jagdeo’s unprecedented presiding over a country where corruption, drug trafficking, money-laundering, hit-men culture, police bestiality, extra-judicial rampage, human rights atrocities, infrastructural collapse and the deepening of poverty have become the norm.
Yet one cannot find an academic essay that offers some kind of analysis as to why Mr. Jagdeo became the demonic god that people quietly accused him of being.
I contend that there isn’t another country you will find this sad omission. In Iran or Cuba or Saudi Arabia, the academics there may be fearful of holding a public discussion on the nature of power but in the universities it is done in the form of seminars and lunch-time debates. How can Guyana become so barren?
How can a nation in the 21st century allow itself to be so divorced from the mainstream thoughts of life? Of course we have the letter pages of the Kaieteur News and Stabroek News. Here is where people vent their feelings. Here is where academically inclined individuals write on the tyranny of power in Guyana. Here is where you will find an episodic interpretation of Jagdeo’s abuse of power or Ramotar’s colossal mediocrity.
If you take a professional poll where you ask people where they get their understanding on how ruling politicians misbehave they will point to the letter pages of these two papers. The late David De Caires, founder of the Stabroek News, said that the letter columns of his paper were one of the most popular sections and he took on the task of being the letters editor.
Come June, the Guyana Historical and Research Society will have its annual conference. I have a copy of the draft programme. There isn’t a section on power in today’s Guyana; there isn’t a presentation on Mr. Jagdeo’s tenure. There is no presentation assessing the three years of Ramotar in office. There isn’t a paper on the twenty three years of the PPP in office.
When a society is riveted by the use of hegemonic power and nowhere one can find a scholarly essay on the origin and nature of such hegemony, it is a sad but gigantic indication that such a country is dead.

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