Can someone please help Donald Ramotar

May 12, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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It is mind-boggling for the captain of a continuously losing cricket team to heap praise on his wicket-keeper, who throughout the Test series, dropped vital catches. For the captain to say that his wicket-keeper never dropped catches is tantamount to being a fool and will bring ridicule.
As a human being, not just a Guyanese, I feel sorry for Donald Ramotar. Surely, a president can say partisan things but even in that game he has to appear credible. Why would a president say the most outlandish things that invite laughter from his nation? In reporting on the 2015 elections, the BBC lists Guyana as the third poorest country in South America after Haiti and Nicaragua.
It has been like that a long time now. But President Ramotar told an audience in Albion in July 2013 (see my August 8, 2013 column) that in his three remaining years in power, he plans to make Guyana, a First World country. It meant that Mr. Ramotar would have performed the most miraculous feat in nation-building since Plato wrote, “the Republic.”
From being the third poorest in South America and one of the poorest in the entire world, Mr. Ramotar would have jumped more than a hundred and fifty countries in the space of three years. It was appalling nonsense and all Guyanese knew it was. In November of the next year (2014) at another public event, Mr. Ramotar repeated the silly statement. Can’t Ramotar be more realistic when he speaks about the performance of his government?
After voting yesterday with his wife, Mr. Ramotar was interviewed by the media. He made three observations that were both infantile and dangerous. He said he told Jimmy Carter before the former American President left on Sunday that the opposition wasted priceless opportunities at inclusive governance. Secondly, he said that the parliamentary committees were embodiments of power-sharing. Thirdly, opposition supporters had nothing to fear from a 2015 PPP election victory because since 1992, the PPP has not victimized any such person.
The first two opinions need not detain us suffice it to say that opposition participation in parliamentary committees is not power-sharing because state control under our constitution is exclusively in the hands of the presidency. The two most blatant examples of this are the spending of monies by the Finance Minister that Parliament had prohibited. This was what eventually led to the no-confidence motion and Ramotar’s refusal to assent to Bills passed by Parliament.
It is the third opinion that is both comical and dangerous. If Mr. Ramotar could say that since 1992 when it came to power, the PPP never victimized its critics then that is equivalent to saying that there was never a thing named slavery and there was never a thing called the killing of Jews by Nazi Germany.
The denial of victimization of Guyanese who criticized the PPP Government may sound asinine but it is dangerous—dangerous in the sense that it calls into question how mentally
balanced Mr. Ramotar is.
If Mr. Ramotar can argue that his PPP Government since 1992 was never vindictive towards an opposition person or a citizen who was opposed to it, then it is frightening to think what this man will do if he is reelected.
One does not know where to start to show Mr. Ramotar the evidence and the pieces of evidence would run into the thousands not hundreds. I honestly don’t know where to begin but we can start with the media. It was Mrs. Jagan herself, the matriarch of the PPP, that informed President Jagdeo he was wrong to withdraw state placements from the Stabroek News. Later, the Kaieteur News fell victim to that vindictive act.
One wonders how the publishers of both of these newspapers feel when both were denied their application for radio licenses and more than two dozens such permits were awarded and not even one went to an independent organization much less a critic of the PPP.
Mr. Ramotar said he told Carter that if he wins the 2015 elections, he will not be pressured into power-sharing. That is obvious. Even when Ramotar lost the 2011 elections, he refused even a modicum of power-sharing. But the problem with people like those in the PPP leadership, is that they think that the nonsense they tell Guyanese they can also tell people from other countries.
Mr. Ramotar seriously believes that Jimmy Carter does not know about the internecine ethnic and political divisions that strangulate Guyana’s development? Does Ramotar believe the scholars at the Carter Centre haven’t informed Mr. President Carter about the nature of power under the PPP? I hope Ramotar isn’t that stupid.

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