Jagdeo: Embourgeoisification of a working class party

Jan 25, 2018 Freddie Kissoon

I wish to quote words former president, Bharrat Jagdeo uttered days ago; “And I made it clear that the PPP is open to people. It was set up as a working-class party. It was not set up as a party based on race, but class based. We are working class, but we support the Private Sector. And we support people of every race, and every religion would find a home in the PPP.”
Even the Working People’s Alliance, when it transformed from a pressure group to a political party in 1976, did not have the working class credentials as the PPP and the PNC had. Both parties were founded by two men – Jagan and Burnham – who at the time of their praxis had middle class professions but the PPP and PNC had serious and formidable working class credentials.
Because of the nature of colonial society and because political parties needed the strategic labyrinth of trade unions, the PPP and PNC reached out to untold numbers of poor class activists who worked their way up the ladder and became prominent figures on the national landscape.
When Desmond Hoyte became president and leader of the PNC, his lifestyle was amazingly ordinary. Hoyte lived in his lower middle class house on North Road during all the years of his presidency – 1985-1992. It is absolutely stupid to compare Hoyte’s home with Jagdeo’s luxurious mansion in Pradoville 2. Any scholar who attempts to do so got his university training from an abandoned cake-shop.
Of the two working class parties that are still in the dominant role in Guyanese politics, the PNC remains far less an ostentatious organisation than the PPP. It is the opinion of this researcher that as president, Jagdeo not only embourgeoisified the leadership of the PPP but he destroyed its original working class physiology.
Researching the death of the working class nature of the PPP under Jagdeo, one would encounter materials that can fill a dozen books. In 2011, when he was being questioned on the stand by Jagdeo’s lawyer, Anil Nandlall, in Jagdeo’s libel case against me and this newspaper, in response to a question, Roger Luncheon said he knew Jagdeo after the PPP came to power in 1992.
Jagdeo hails from Unity, Mahaica and went to a Russian university, Patrice Lumumba University, where tuition was more ideological than academic. When he became Finance Minister, he lived in a government flat in Echilibar Villas in Campbellville.
After he became president in 1999 but moreso after 2001, Jagdeo and the PPP leadership landed on a gold mine that would make Omai’s collection look like biscuit crumbs. In a Cabinet session to discuss business concessions to Bobby Ramroop, President Jagdeo excused himself saying he was a personal friend of Ramroop, one of the richest men in the country.
By the time, his presidency was up, Jagdeo chalked up a record of being the close friend of some of Guyana’s wealthiest citizens. He currently lives in a two acre mansion with swimming pool.
For a man who says that the party he leads is working class, then we should take neo-Nazis seriously when they say Hitler was an angelic leader. As President, Mr. Jagdeo invited the then President of the Caribbean Development Bank, Dr. Compton Bourne, to buy an acre of state land in Pradoville 2 for a mere couple million dollars.
For a working class leader of a working class party, Mr. Jagdeo suffered a bout of amnesia. He forgot that there were literally hundreds of working class soldiers, police officials, teachers, sugar workers, state employees who served their country faithfully and deserved that plot more than Dr. Bourne whose salary at the time was millions of times more than a working class income.
Interesting to note, the forensic audit of Pradoville 2 revealed that Priya Manickchand, when as minister, got a plot, built a house, and sold it for a million American dollars to businessman, David Narine. Interesting to note, Clement Rohee, when as minister, celebrated his annual birthday at Georgetown Club.
In his book, “Sweetening Bitter Sugar,” Clem Seecharan said that the Booker CEO, Sir Jock Campbell was a Fabian socialist who refused to eat at Georgetown Club (see page 51 for Campbell’s contempt for the bourgeois culture of Georgetown Club.) It seems like the Booker Baron was more working class in his orientation than the boys from the working class party, the PPP.
Finally, it is also interesting to know that the sugar union, GAWU, the PPP’s sidekick, bought its head office in a high priced real estate area – Kingston and is reputed to be the richest trade union in the English-speaking Caribbean.

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Jagdeo: Embourgeoisification of a working class party

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