The inglorious days of the PPP’s rule

Oct 11, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Former President, Donald Ramotar, wrote last week that the rule of the PPP was a glorious period. His adumbration set off a furious series of rebuttals that is still going on. What is noteworthy is that there have been responses to this type of praise of the PPP days in government.
I have always contended that it is important that when PPP leaders write about governance and democracy, those “alternative facts’ should be countered with the facts of twenty-three years of PPP’s misrule.
Any leader from Independence onwards can select accomplishments and obfuscate the negatives. From Burnham through Hoyte to the PPP presidents up to Granger, there are achievements that could be highlighted but the sordid dimensions of governance will remain unspoken.
It is alright, and perfectly so for party mandarins and party fanatics to speak of glorious days of their organization when it ruled. It is for the independent mind to correct the myths that are perpetuated. My deeply held belief is that Guyana saw two periods of authoritarian rule – under Burnham from 1968 -1985 and the two PPP presidents, 1999 – 2015.
If I were to select achievements and depravities of both periods, I would say the Burnham/Hoyte era accomplished more.
President Burnham had his faults but he had vision. There is no space to elaborate on this aspect of Guyana’s history but the Jagdeo period had venalities and depravities that should take away the use of the word “glorious” to describe the reign of the twenty-three years of PPP in power.
The list of horrendously wrong directions of the Jagdeo Government is certainly not a short one. The moments of madness were plentiful.
It is difficult to enumerate the inglorious moments of governance in Guyana, 1999-2015 in a newspaper column but some abominations were too terrible to contemplate. If I had to pick a few on the list, I would definitely include the construction of the Marriott Hotel. If the Marriott wasn’t built, in a small, impoverished economy like Guyana’s US$60 million into education, health and policing would have created a better Guyana.
When long from now, the PPP’s time in office finds itself in the history books, the building of the Marriott Hotel would be a mystery to readers. This had to be one of the lowest periods of dispiritedness in Guyana. Why would an economy like Guyana’s need a Marriott Hotel? Where was the flow of visitors whether from business, sports and tourism to enable the hotel to be a profit-making venture given the fact that there were already two huge hotels of similar kind? If anything in the twenty-three years of PPP’s domination has dented its credibility it has to be the Marriott. It was an act of total incomprehension.
Then there was the Skeldon sugar factory. A letter writer last week wrote that Jagdeo was no Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore; that he was in fact a failure. The writing was on the wall since the advent of globalization that the sugar industry in Guyana was no longer viable.
Globalization, in fact, killed Guyana’s sugar industry. Globalization has killed many industries in the Third World. Right here in Guyana, it killed the tobacco industry at Laluni. The Skeldon factory cost US$200 million. Put that money with the US$60 million for the Marriott into the economy and the PPP could have been in power today. Such huge sums in an economy like this had to produce positive results.
Next – corruption. Guyanese woke up one morning and met on their doorstep a cancer we heard about in places like Nigeria, Mexico, Angola etc. This country had become a bottomless pit of corruption. In a small society there are no secrets. Ministers, their friends, their relatives, bureaucrats with party connection suddenly became prodigiously rich overnight.
I still believe that the APNU+AFC advisors, (if there are such people) made a huge strategic mistake in not early in the rule of the new government, concentrated on the exposure of corruption. It could have dented the barefaced recidivism we are seeing from the PPP.
Finally – the criminalized state. It was Professor Clive Thomas who popularized the term. It consisted of people in drugs and money-laundering and their labyrinthine overlapping with the State.
This nexus took in politicians, public servants and police officials. It has to be a shock to the system to hear that the era of the PPP in office was a glorious one. There is absolutely no way President Burnham and Desmond Hoyte would have accepted this kind of state criminality.

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The inglorious days of the PPP’s rule

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