Genetically and instinctively undemocratic

Jul 01, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I got two telephone calls from people who are in the leadership of district groups of the PPP on the lower East Coast. They contacted me after learning that Mr. Bharrat Jagdeo has been selected to become the Leader of the Opposition
Both told me that their groups were not consulted. One runs the risk of being called stupid if one thinks that the PPP’s national membership was canvassed by its cabal of leaders over who the PPP wanted to be the Leader of the Opposition. In most countries of the world, after a party loses two consecutive national elections, there would have been a leadership battle in front of the membership.
The devilish thing about the PPP is that its survival among East Indians of Guyana reinforces the mythological culture that it was born with. The PPP lost the recent poll by one percent, and that served not as a wake-up call, but as an assertion that the PPP is invincible and unbeatable.
PPP leaders told themselves that after twenty-three years in power their supporters stood with them, therefore their supporters have faith in them. Why then would the leaders want to go to the membership to ask them to choose a new leader? The PPP cabal believes that the membership will accept whatever they do.
The collateral damage of this type of thinking is ethnic pandering and democratic loss. The PPP is a major institution of influence in Guyana, and only if it is devastated by exodus, diminishing resources and prosecution over illegal behaviour while in office in the coming five years, will it not continue to be recalcitrant in its ethnic incitement and political mischief.
The PPP cabal had no reason to have a leadership contest. That may have been done if it was decapitated in the 2015 poll and it had to rise from the ashes. Right now the PPP is in invincibility overdrive. It couldn’t lose the elections, because it doesn’t lose elections since its constituencies are genetically tied to it. Despite the absence of evidence that the recent national poll was rigged, the PPP still went to court. It went to court for psychological not political reasons, because its mythological mentality informs it that it didn’t lose.
With this kind of mental state, there is no reason to have a membership vote on the position of Leader of the Opposition. My thesis is that unless the PPP is virtually reduced to a survivalist state, it will not adopt democratic pathways in its selection of its top leaders. The PPP will not have its national membership vote in a leadership contest. This is not the way the PPP cabal sees political life
The other side of this coin is the strong possibility that Jagdeo would have lost if he had to face competition in a party congress. The analyst must always be careful not to equate the Indian ballot in a national election as a vote for the PPP leader. Indians vote for the party. They do not give their ballots to individual leaders.
If an unknown was the presidential candidate, with the kind of appeal to raw, racist/tribalist/ bestial instincts we saw Mr. Jagdeo engaged in, then, the percentage would have been the same. The PPP got 49 percent of the total ballots not because Indians wanted Ramotar or Jagdeo back in power. They wanted the Indian party back in power.
If allowed to face debates from competing contenders, especially the younger ones aspiring to be the next generation of authority in the PPP, Jagdeo may have lost. Jagdeo will become the Leader of the Opposition because, he, Jagdeo chose himself.
Jagdeo couldn’t run in 2011, so he hand-picked Ramotar, thus ending the political career of Ralph Ramkarran. The only way Ramkarran could have beaten Ramotar for the slot in 2011 was if both men had to persuade delegates. Ramkarran would have been far more convincing than Ramotar.
This country is in for an intriguing and fascinating time in the coming years with Mr. Jagdeo as Opposition Leader. And there is one reason for this. Mr. Jagdeo will not be able to carry out his parliamentary duties while preoccupied with systematic court cases.
I lived continuously in Guyana under the twelve-year-old rule of Jagdeo, and I believe if ever there was a case for the prosecution of a leader who abused power while in office, the most eligible contender would be Bharrat Jagdeo. I believe ninety-nine percent of the people who voted for the APNU-AFC coalition, if asked if they would like Mr. Jagdeo to be investigated, they would animatedly say yes. Nothing less would be acceptable.

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Genetically and instinctively undemocratic

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