You lost a what… an election?

May 21, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In 1990, the communist, pro-Cuban Sandinista party in Nicaragua lost the General Elections. I saw Nigel Westmass of the WPA laughing his head off as he approached me. He had a Newsweek magazine in his hand. Nigel’s laughter was as large as the Amazon. He said, “Freddie look at this.”
It was a cartoon in the magazine with President Fidel Castro sitting on a chair, and Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan president standing in front of him looking like a school boy before his headmaster, all scared of the punishment he is about to receive for a very terrible act. Castro said to Ortega, “You lost a what … an election?”
One could just imagine what went on inside Freedom House very early Tuesday morning when Ramotar, Rohee, Jagdeo, Teixeira, Charles Ramson Senior, Luncheon and others found out the PPP was defeated. Rohee must have walked up to Ramotar and yelled; “Tell me you didn’t lose the election.” Gail Teixeira in her soporific Canadian accent would have shouted out, “Have we really lost the whole election Donald?”
But it would have been the rage of Jagdeo that would have brought down the walls of Freedom House with his reverberations. A journalist at the press conference that Jagdeo held during the long wait for the GECOM results asked if it was true that Jagdeo had slapped Ramotar during a disagreement. Jagdeo muttered that it was all rumours.
Such a rumour had to fly fast because for Jagdeo, the man who dominated Guyana with Napoleonic conquests, losing power was not scientifically possible. It would have been left to Jagdeo to imitate Castro and shouted down to Ramotar with the inquiry, “You lost a what…the election?”
For all PPP leaders fed on a diet of PPP’s messianic role in Guyanese history and the Jaganite mythology of invincibility, it was not humanely possible for the PPP to bring second in a national election. But here is where nonsense meets asininity. PPP leaders were fooling themselves during the campaign that they could not lose the 2015 poll.
Baytoram Ramharack wrote a letter after the preliminary results were announced that contained the following words; “The coalition has succeeded in demonstrating that it was possible to destroy the one historically powerful weapon of the PPP/C that has been at the core of its very existence “ the ability to win General Elections.”
Either Ramharack is being foolish or he is poor in his research. The 2015 election defeat was not the first for the PPP. Ramharack had to know that the PPP lost the 2011 elections. Though I haven’t done the research, I believe there isn’t another Commonwealth state where a coalition is not possible after a General Election.
If it wasn’t for that anomaly in our Constitution, this country would have been entering its fourth year as a new government. How can the PPP believe that it couldn’t lose general elections when that is what happened in 2011? What deceived the PPP is that they equated elections with power. The PPP lost the 2011 elections but still had power. This is where the PPP self-destructed. It locked out completely from its mind what happened in 2011. And it did so because it still had domination over Guyana.
What happened in 2015 was a replay of 2011. The PPP got the same votes. APNU too. And the AFC. The result was the same – the PPP was defeated. Power evaded the PPP this time because the AFC and APNU teamed up. How Ramharack missed that should fool no one. He deliberately omitted the 2011 scenario.
The question is why the PPP failed to do better in 2015 from what they got in 2011. That will take several columns. Obviously that will occupy the pen of all commentators who study the political landscape of this country. Obviously, the average citizen will want to know why. It should be explained to them.
The PPP lost in 2011 and 2015 because every PPP leader was harboring under the illusion that the party of Cheddi Jagan could never lose an election. This illusion was dangerous because it blocked from reality the fact that the PPP from 2001 was no longer the party of Cheddi and Janet Jagan.
Even when the PPP put Jagan’s son in Berbice to campaign in 2001, it lost. Even when the PPP appealed to Jagan’s daughter for support in 2015 and she gave it, the PPP lost.
The PPP will continue to lose because Cheddi and Janet are dead. The PPP is billions of miles away from the PPP of the Jagan days, and Guyana has come a long way since Cheddi Jagan made the PPP undefeatable.

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