A daughter’s embrace of a fallen leader

Mar 09, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I saw a photograph of Roger Luncheon’s daughter embracing him after he left the SOCU head office. The young lady looks like my daughter’s friend, when the two attended School of the Nations. This column was typed Wednesday morning at Kaieteur News because blackout came at 9 o’clock on Tuesday night and GPL said the electricity won’t be back until way in the afternoon of Wednesday. It meant I didn’t get time to ask my daughter if the young lady in the photograph was her friend.
The embrace reminds me of the families’ grief of fallen leaders. It happens all the time. We have read about it since time immemorial, and we will continue to read about. I have asked in several of these columns; when undemocratic leaders harm their subjects why do these family members not remonstrate with them because after the fall, the consequences can be very depressing.
Twice I mentioned the grief and anger of Saddam Hussein’s daughter. But the record would show that untold numbers died under this man’s rule, including two of his own sons-in-law. They defected, went to another country, returned to Iraq and were mysteriously murdered.
Surely, family members must ask their parents who are in power for explanations, when they pick up the papers and read, or see on television, the news of critics being killed, workers being dismissed and vast wealth accumulated. The daughter of President Forbes Burnham wrote that when Sister Hazel Campayne, her head teacher of Saint Rose’s High School was transferred from there to an interior location after she joined a picket line, she asked her father why that was done.
The problem with authoritarian leaders is that power intoxicates their mind and they are unable to see that power like everything in life is fleeting. Prime Minister Patrick Manning was very dismissive of the concern of his Member of Parliament, Keith Rowley. Manning even moved against Rowley and wanted him removed. Manning called a general election midway in his term and lost. The very Keith Rowley became the leader of Manning’s party and Manning lived long enough to see Keith Rowley become Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.
That is what power does to people. Manning was assured of victory. Power blinds people from their mortality. I remember a person very close to Desmond Hoyte had warned him about the 1992 elections, and that he could lose it. The former police officer was advising Hoyte about constitutional changes, but Hoyte chose not to listen. It is interesting to note that both Hoyte and Manning did not live long after they lost power.
Will future human society be any different? I doubt it. Power is a dangerous Molotov cocktail. It combines authority, arrogance, ignorance, invincibility, insensitivity, cruelty, inhumanity, abandonment, nepotism and many other negative elements. But it is the attitude of false invincibility that in the end proves fatal. From Cheddi Jagan right down to the last PPP president, Donald Ramotar, the permanent thought that had completely swept the soul of the PPP’s leadership was that it was a natural born winner whose destiny was to control Guyana.
Both Cheddi Jagan and his wife infused that mythology into every young leader they protégéd from the time the PPP lost power in 1964; and it will never stop. If one content-analyzes every major speech to PPP constituencies by every major PPP leader since the PPP lost office in May 2015, the recurring theme is that the 2011 and 2015 elections were rigged. The other side of the coin is that these leaders are saying that the PPP cannot lose power.
When young leaders listen to this false invincibility, they inculcate the seminal teaching of the Jagans, that the PPP cannot lose power. What happens then is that young men and women who have imbibed this doctrine, when they get into power, they behave as permanent leaders. This was the fateful road Jagdeo took, and those he strung along with him accepted the permanency of the PPP’s hegemony.
Priya Manickchand did not believe the PPP would be out of office in the 2015 election when the year before she acted out of protocol at the residence of the US Ambassador. Kwame McCoy never believed the PPP could lose an election when he assaulted Mark Benschop. Winston Brassington saw the PPP as unbeatable so he used NICIL as if it was personal and not private property.
One could go with these names, but Jagdeo needs special mention. He acted as a sempiternal monarch. Had he read about the fate of Charles the First, he would not have ended up in the SOCU office.

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