Unnecessary tyranny

Jun 08, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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There is a consensus among Guyanese whenever they discuss the faults of the PPP Government, that some mistakes were unnecessary, really stupid and maybe inexplicable. It was the philosopher of the Holy Roman Empire, Saint Aquinas, who wrote that everything in life has a logical meaning and there cannot be a thing that has no explanation for its existence. But Saint Aquinas never heard about the PPP. If he did, he would have changed his mind.
It can be seriously argued that many of the terrible mistakes of the PPP Government were so obviously unnecessary that they may remain mysteries in the history of politics of Guyana. Where to start will be a daunting task, because Jagdeo and Ramotar shared fifteen years of power between them that were marked by countless idiotic things that should never have occurred.
For the length of time that some of the PPP people were in politics, you wonder if they injected commonsense into the practice of politics. I will pull down examples from my memory bank at random. Take Roger Luncheon’s “feral blast” remark. About sixty five percent of this country’s population is under forty years of age and maybe all of those persons are positive in their views about the United States. Almost all of the PPP’s constituencies want to migrate to the US. PPP Ministers went to the US to ensure that their kids were born as American citizens.
Priya Manickchand went to the home of the Ambassador on an occasion that the Americans treat as sacred – Independence Day, and behaved terribly. The entire country was embarrassed. The commonsensical thing for PPP leaders to do was to avoid commenting on Manickchand’s behaviour. Luncheon praised her. He referred to her disgraceful behaviour as a feral blast.
The PPP under Jagdeo had a formidable figure at the top, Jagdeo himself. But Jagdeo was never interested in any kind of disciplinary mechanism in the PPP government, so his ministers and subordinates spoke and acted the way they wanted to. Under Ramotar, the government had no stabilizing figure; no one was in charge. It was a free for all.
What obtained under Jagdeo and Ramotar would not happen even under military dictatorship. Research would reveal a plethora of examples where Ministers who grossly misbehaved under the most severe authoritarian systems were dismissed. Some obvious names come to mind in the PPP kingdom – Neil Kumar, Charles Ramson Senior, Clement Rohee. Some of the utterances of these people are hard to find elsewhere.
One wonders what the PPP must be saying about the loss of an election by 5000 votes. Could those votes have been secured if there weren’t these blatant, egregious assaults on    the people of Guyana? Did Ramotar cause the loss of votes with his unbelievable plunge into the ocean of madness with his depraved support for Bheri Ramsarran? Surely this will remain one of the mysteries in Guyanese politics.
For me, the most obvious enigma of politics in our area of the Caribbean was the calling of a national election by Prime Minister of Trinidad, Patrick Manning just half way through his term. There was absolutely no reason for such a quick poll. Now I would put Ramotar’s embrace of Ramsarran in the Sherlina Nageer incident above the Manning event.
Why would a president right in the middle of an election campaign which every school boy knew would have been a tight race, openly defend his minister over the most disgusting act of insult against a woman? It was not a harsh exchange of words, but a threat to slap the woman and have her stripped in public. At that moment, Ramsarran had lost his public job. Ramsarran’s insanity continued two days after with more nasty insults against Ms. Nageer. The President of the country said the woman set up Ramsarran then labeled his subsequent remarks as the media taking it out of context. Yet PPP supporters want to know how they lost the election.
Why would the loss of the 2015 election be a headache for PPP supporters to understand, when so many really unnecessary stupidities characterized the reign of the Jagdeo/Ramotar cabal? Did it help the PPP’s election cause to dismiss a sugar worker when his only crime was that he defended himself against a habitually drunken manager? Did it help the PPP’s election hope when it refused to open up at least one of its state-owned swimming pools to the general public? And Bibi Shadick as Pro-Chancellor of UG? Really?
Was Saint Aquinas right when he wrote centuries ago that every action can be explained? The answer is yes. The PPP made the most foolish mistakes and didn’t care. Why? We will leave the answer for forthcoming columns.

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