Carnivalesque violation of propriety

Apr 19, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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People have been telling me about the nocturnal escapades of Ministers and high state officials in the tradition of the age of the PPP behemoths. Happily this is not David Granger’s style. And Guyanese should jump so high with joy that they shouldn’t mind if they get stuck while climbing down.
Mr. Granger cuts a figure of somber yet inviting deportment. They say never say never but I can never see President Granger doing what Presidents Jagdeo and Ramotar  and Prime Minister Rowley did – back ball in public.
One cannot and should not stop high state officials, important bureaucrats and their ministerial bosses from painting the town but context is everything in life. In the context of what we have just been through, it is not politically wise to emulate the profligate lifestyle of the Jagdeoites. It is simply too early for canivalesque enjoyment by those who inherited Jagdeo’s power. It is for reason of context that the Joe Harmon Zeppelin has generated national disappointment
A picture paints a thousand words and I have seen more photographs of the Guyanese delegation led by Joe Harmon enjoying its trip in China. These photographs do not portray an expression of an emerging new political culture. This is Guyana’s perennial problem – how to transform our depraved, suffocating political culture. My Sunday and Monday columns were on this subject so some might say there is no need to belabor the point. But why not? At the heart of the Harmon scandal is the story of this culture.
Every step along the way, the APNU-AFC bandwagon after May 2015 practised this old culture. I wrote about the Parliament cordons so many times that readers may say; “Not again.” But is there a connection between the Coalition’s dismissal of its own principles early in the life of its government and Harmon’s excessive latitude?
I am referring to the steel barriers around the streets that surround Parliament Building that in 2012 the APNU and AFC voted to remove. Every Guyanese citizen in the entire world except the TUC’s General Secretary, Lincoln Lewis either ignored that violation of principle or simply saw it as too petty to worry about.
This is where the lay person invites his/her own oppression. Governments take an improper inch, when the nation remains silent they take two feet. When the population continues with its reticence, a yard is chewed up, then a mile then the entire country.  The average citizen treats the small indiscretions and the tiny illegalities of their government with no attention. But it is this nonchalance that allows state power to go in unwanted directions.
My question is, if the population and the media had picked up on the steel barrier hypocrisy and made it a sustained national issue, could we have prevented the salary increase scandal and the Harmon imbroglio?
My answer is yes. Once the Coalition saw that the society was not prepared to tolerate aberrations and excesses no matter how small, the Coalition big-wigs would have been more discerning and learning. They would have been forced to be cautious. This is the tragic mistake the post-1992 leaders in the PPP including Cheddi Jagan made.
What Jagan and the PPP did after 1992 was to use the outpouring of national goodwill as a screen to mask their opportunistic use of state power. As Jagan undertook the ethnic and party proselytization of the civil service and wider public sector, Guyanese were still in the give-Jagan- a- chance mood. It was only after Hoyte saw the writing on the wall and started slo fyaah/mo fyaah that the PNC constituencies woke up.
Are we seeing a repeat of the Jagan 1992 Government with the 2016 Coalition? There was widespread embrace of the Coalition because of the Herculean dirty stables that Jagdeo left. Both Granger and Nagamootoo contributed to this euphoria. People were glad that Nagamootoo as a former leader in the PPP reached out to the PNC.
And Granger was generally seen as the new, decent, clean President that Guyana has cried out for since the Desmond Hoyte presidency.
Jagan and his wife, Janet, who became President after Cheddi Jagan died, failed to sustain the embrace they got from Guyanese after 1992. Are we seeing the same here? The similarities are uncannily stark. Months after Cheddi Jagan came to power he began to topple African heads in the public sector.
Months after the Coalition came to office it secretly offered itself a huge pay rise with the justification coming from the mouth of Joe Harmon that you have to pay Ministers for their talent. Now the very Joe needs that talent to keep him aloft in the rough waters he is in.

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