Ramotar, Jagdeo, Nandlall: Triumvirate of Hades

Jan 21, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Let’s start with Donald Ramotar. In an interview with this newspaper he lambasts the President of Guyana for not confronting corruption within his government. Obviously, he is accusing a leader that has been in office a mere 19 months. The obvious question is what has he done against corruptibility in his four years of presidency. Well let’s examine the facts. One of his ministers is before the court for alleged fraud involving over half a billion dollars.
Then a high level officer in Ramotar’s office when he was President, Omar Shariff, looks likely to be charged. Then there is the General Manager of the Guyana Marketing Corporation when Ramotar was President who is before the courts. Ramotar became President in November 2011 and returned without even one change, the Cabinet of Jagdeo that had certain members who are known for their kleptocracy. One of them built a mansion with a swimming pool whose change room can rival any middle class house in any of the housing schemes in Guyana.
Under Ramotar’s presidency, one of his Ministers bought a house lot in Pradoville 2 and sold it reportedly for a million American dollars. During his presidency, Cabinet Ministers who already had more than one house, bought land in Pradoville 2. What did Ramotar do about it? What did Ramotar do about corruption in his four-year tenure?
You do not want to use condescending words to a former president, but his behaviour forces you to do so. I would now say that it is comical and bordering on asininity for the former president to accuse Mr. Granger of not confronting corruption in the APNU+AFC administration, when one can go so far as to say that not only did President Ramotar do absolutely nothing, but on the contrary, corruption expanded under his rule particularly in the area of mining.
One political gentleman connected to mining took his cut from investors and has since departed from the Guyanese world of politics and has migrated. If SARU does not haul him in, then I say leave Omar Shariff alone.
So what would Ramotar say if you ask him about his hypocrisy? You can bet every cent you have that he would use the adverb, “absolutely” to describe the non-existence of graft and financial venality during his tenure. He will say, “there was absolutely no corruption in my government”.
Then we move to Anil Nandlall. I don’t know why Nandlall wants to emulate Clement Rohee, but surely he is a million times smarter than Rohee to know when he is being silly. Nandlall is carping about special prosecutors for impending charges against alleged corrupt Jagdeoite Ministers. The very Nandlall was a special prosecutor in the trumped up charge against a radical anti-PPP activist – Mark Benschop.
Nandlall’s best friend, Vic Puran, to whom he offered the funeral eulogy, was a special prosecutor in the treason case against Bruce Munroe and his wife Carol Ann, and their friend Len Wharton. The trio was acquitted. So what would Nandlall say if you point out his contradiction to him? The answer is obvious. He would say that the Jagdeo Government was justified in what it did then; the Granger Government has no such justification.
We come now to the man who sued me and this newspaper for referring to him as an ideological racist, a description I think I have proved, but I will not go further since the matter is still in front of the courts. Jagdeo got up in front of an audience at the Convention Centre and uttered the most morally scurrilous derogations about a senior Minister. If anything constituted libel, Jagdeo’s emanations did.
This is the same Jagdeo, when as President, tolerated and promoted a Minister who was involved in a huge outburst in which his spouse committed suicide and he had to be hospitalized. This same fellow, completely intoxicated, publicly assaulted an 18-year-old youth in a rum shop. This same Minister again in a drunken state got involved in an accident in which the legs of a former policeman were crushed. In this concatenation of debauchery, the Minister was never disciplined or demoted.
This was and is the nature of the monsters, beasts and gorgons that dwell inside the PPP. This is the nature of these people who want to rule Guyana again.

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