Ramotar and the Nader Effect

Nov 04, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Outside of Geoff Da Silva’s apology when he was the CEO of GoInvest at a press conference at the Pegasus, no high –ranking PPP leader serving in state administration ever publicly apologized for a mistake made.
Mr. Da Silva called the press conference after Yesu Persaud, during his remarks at the launching of the Guyana Times, pointed to concessions awarded by the state to Bobby Ramroop’s business company that went outside of the law.
Then President Bharrat Jagdeo, at the same event, lambasted Persaud for his comments. Days later it was acknowledged by the Government that Ramroop did receive concessions that were not backed by law. The PPP leadership went to Parliament and did the necessary retroactive correction.
Da Silva told his press conference that GoInvest made the error and there and then apologized. Research will find that before Da Silva, President Cheddi Jagan had apologized to African-Guyanese for an observation he made that global Africans are at the bottom of the economic ladder.
There could be more but those are the only two instances of apology I have found. For research purposes, Mr. Ramotar’s apology for awarding the presidential pardon to a convicted child killer does not vitiate the conclusion that PPP leaders did not display contrite feelings over egregious wrongs they committed during the exercise of power.
Mr. Ramotar holds no official state job; is not the leader of any political party and does not sit in the National Assembly. One cannot point to his contrite offering as an example of a PPP Government leader saying sorry.
One wonders at the countless times history would have had a different outcome if words and attitudes went in the directions they ought not to have gone. The most pyrotechnical example that comes to mind is the American presidential election in 2000 where Al Gore lost by hundreds of votes to George Bush.
Another candidate in the race got thousands of votes that had he not contested, many of those votes would have gone to Gore. Bush won the election because he took Florida in the Electoral College by 517 votes.
In the same state, Consumer advocate, Nader picked up 97,421 ballots. Nader contended that before the elections, Gore refused to accommodate his agenda. Today in American journalism, you often read about the “Nader Effect” What would American society be like today if there wasn’t the Nader Effect in 2000?
Did Guyana see the Nader Effect in 2011? Did the Alliance For Change (AFC) bring the Nader Effect in that general election? Would there have been the Nader Effect in 2011 if what Ramotar did last week, he had done long before 2011 – apologize to the nation for errors, lapses and irregularities?
Would the PPP still be in power if PPP leaders, one by one, would have marched to the press podium and say sorry?
There is an adequate body of theoretical material from which one can draw to conclude that the Nader Effect was a work in the elections of 2011. Of course 2011 marked the turning point in the PPP’s electoral erasure. In that election there was a direct link to the irredeemable behaviour of the PPP.
The PPP did not lose by a big margin in 2011. It lost by one parliamentary seat In fact, the result for the latter was so tantalizingly close that it would have been a foregone conclusion that the PPP would have won the majority if the AFC did not contest. In 2011, the AFC took votes from the PPP the way Nader took votes from Gore.
Gore disappeared after he lost in 2000. The PPP never recovered after it lost in 2011. Why did Nader get so many votes in Florida? We can’t answer that. We can answer why the AFC got so many votes in 2011.
Several factors explain it and it will not be wise to cite a single cause. But the hubris and hauteur of the PPP leadership substantially dented its credibility long before the 2011 poll arrived. Mr. Ramotar was not in power then; in fact he held no official state role other than being on the Board of Guysuco.
But as the leader of the party in government, the fallout from the PPP’s pomposity and megalomania had to affect his standing as the PPP’s presidential candidate.
Glorious opportunities were missed to say sorry, a word that may have gone a long way in strengthening the PPP electoral chances in 2011
The insult to Yesu Persaud, a national icon was horrible. A simple apology would have helped the PPP’s image. Ramotar’s apology last week was too little, too late.

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