The president who became a footnote

May 06, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Here are the words of former President Donald Ramotar on the arrest of Kwame McCoy for assault on Mark Benschop in a published letter in the Kaieteur News (“Former President, Ramotar accuses Gov’t of racism,” Thursday, May 5, 2016); “…. locked up for days in poor conditions….” Kwame McCoy was arrested in the eleventh month of the life of the Coalition Government. It meant that poor conditions in the lock-up had to have started when the Coalition Government came into being, if you follow Ramotar’s logic.
This is an abominable fiction. Poor conditions in the lock-ups at the police stations throughout Guyana existed when Ramotar was General-Secretary of the party that was in office for almost 23 years. Semi-civilized accommodation in all the lock-ups with fetid, nauseating stench was a fact when Ramotar became President in 2011 and were still there when he was defeated in the May 2015 general elections. This barren statement is not the only humiliating cry in the missive of this former president who has nothing to show for his years as the head of the nation’s affairs. Here are more samples.
He goes back to forty-five years ago – when 80 percent of the population wasn’t born – to criticize the PNC. He informs readers that a PPP Minister, EMG Wilson, was assaulted by PNC supporters. Another Minister, Cedric Nunes, was attacked by PNC supporters. This is what a young nation is saddled with. A former president attacks the party in power and goes back 45 years ago to tell us what the PNC did to two PPP Ministers.
We will not dwell on ancient times like Mr. Ramotar, but this failed president’s memory has a convenient life. He didn’t inform us about the other side of the sixties when there was an assassination attempt on the life of an editor critical of the PPP Government or the death of Premier Jagan’s Permanent Secretary when his house was set on fire, and he died along with his wife and five children, or the bombing of the ‘Son Chapman’ where 43 persons lost their lives.
The former president who lost two general elections and was ousted as opposition leader by his party now spends his time as a frequent newspaper letter-writer and sends his correspondences to guess where – the Kaieteur News that Bharrat Jagdeo as President prior to 2015, and after 2015 as Opposition Leader, urged PPP supporters to boycott. When he was president it is doubtful that Ramotar would have tolerated the Chronicle or NCN publishing a statement that accused his Government of racism.
Ramotar in his defence of McCoy accused the police of trying to break McCoy. Deceased lawyer, Vic Puran told me that it was President Ramotar himself who asked him to take the job as prosecutor in the treason trial of the Munroe husband and wife couple and their family friend, Len Wharton. So crooked and fictional was the evidence against the trio that they were freed in the lower court. Would Ramotar like to comment if the police tried to break the Munroe couple and Mr. Wharton?
Ramotar goes on; “My conclusion was that the regime used the police for their political end of trying to break Kwame McCoy. It is actions like that that undermine the professionalism of the police.” This is the same Ramotar who as President went to a funeral service and waxed lyrical about the greatness and professionalism of one of the most corrupt cops Guyana produced – Henry Greene. In my long years of activism, I cannot identify a senior officer in the police and army that was as unprofessional and corrupt as Henry Greene. Greene is dead and gone and many of his Faustian adventures will remain permanent secrets.
I want to end on a personal note, because these memories are tsunamis that spin in one’s soul like windmills out of control. Ramotar’s son knocked down my nephew and broke his right leg. He was in a cast for 13 months. Ramotar and his son never made contact with my nephew. When Mark Benschop cited this fact on his webpage, Ramotar called Benschop and accused him of endangering his son’s life. It was an interesting conversation that Benschop taped and played for me. In it, Ramotar could be heard saying that he, Ramotar, believes in moral politics, as if Ramotar knows what that is.
Finally, I am still waiting for an apology from Ramotar when six weeks after being sworn in as President, my UG contract was terminated five months before it expired. What a sad and pathetic figure this man has become. But then he was always an obscurity.

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The president who became a footnote

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