Latest update November 1st, 2026 10:45 AM
When self pity turns into semi-fascism
I will never be a fan of Forbes Burnham. I can understand and appreciate Mr. Burnham’s post-colonial innovations which were radical departures from mainstream, stultified patterns in economic planning that a majority of the newly independent states adopted. But I honestly believe Mr. Burnham was philosophically, a rejectionist of capitalist or socialist or non-capitalist blueprints for democratic exercise of state power.
He was essentially a transformational autocrat. That is definitely an oxymoron but that was what he was.
But Burnham had a personality make-up that I believe was more tolerant of people who opposed him. He had a personality style that allowed him to appreciate the positives in his detractors. Not so with Mrs. Janet Jagan. She viewed life and people in black and white lenses. Mrs. Jagan either loved you or hated you.
She was too stiff to inculcate grey-area sentiments. Of all the politicians that exercised state power, I would say Mrs. Jagan was the coldest and harshest and unforgiving of them all of them all. Before I come to the quintessence of my polemic here let me quote from Lloyd Best (deceased), a Caribbean icon that is admired and will always be respected by every Caribbean scholar in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He was on loan from the United Nations to Premier Cheddi Jagan in the sixties.
The extract here is taken from, Frank Birbalsingh, “The People’s Progressive Party of Guyana, 1950-1992: An Oral History”. Here is what Professor Best said; “Let me tell you. I think Janet was a very bad influence on Cheddi. I don’t think she had any insight into the complexity of the Guyana situation, and she was the biggest buttress of Cheddi’s intransigence in Guyana. She was very hostile to dissent. In my judgement, she was a person who believed if you were not for me, then you were against me.” (page 89).
I will quote at length from a recent letter from Sam Hinds. Mr. Hinds has embarked on a dangerous journey of filling Guyanese head with his PPP dictated version of history which, to use a strong term, is “jumbie historiography.”
Letters are pouring in from Hinds often in all the daily newspapers and on each occasion, he paints a canvas of a PPP government that tried to do good but was the victim of PNC mischief and violence.
Here is what he wrote last week; “Editor, you may recall the rising tensions in our country as our 1997 (December 16) elections approached. I was President then. Our National Poet, Mr Martin Carter, had died earlier that month and our (PPP/C) Prime Minister and presidential candidate, Mrs Janet Jagan, was being particularly hounded by crowds as she sought to pay her respects at the various ceremonies honouring her colleague of many decades.
“On her way to Mr Carter’s interment at Seven Ponds, she was advised to pause at the Office of the President and she sat with me. She revealed that it seemed to her that we were re-running the 1957 to 1961 period – that after the uproar at the PPP win in 1957, the people of Georgetown, overwhelmingly Afro-Guyanese and supporters of the PNC at that time, settled into a toleration of the PPP government, but as the elections of 1961 approached with prospects of another PPP win in their consciousness, they just couldn’t take it and all hell seemed to break out. As it happened, we, the PPP/C, did win the 1997 elections and all hell did break loose.”
One hoped Mr. Hinds didn’t believe what Mrs. Jagan sermonised him, but it seems that he did. Mrs Jagan spent her entire life conjuring up that self-pity portrait to all she met. She converted countless numbers with that mantra.
One day in his office, Dr. Dale Bisnauth with a doctorate in history and academic books to his name, told me how that persuasion of Mrs. Jagan caused him to join the PPP and serve it as a Minister of Government and Mirror newspaper columnist. David Dabydeen too, at a Moses Nagamootoo birthday lime one evening at Nagamootoo’s home, echoed similar sentiments to me.
The trouble with Mrs. Jagan’s self-pity carping is that it is a one-sided version of history. The mistakes of the PPP regime between 1957 and 1961 were many and were based on insensitive feelings for the other half of the population. The identical mistakes were made between 1992 and 1997. Any leader of the WPA between those years would tell you how contemptuous Mrs. Jagan and the PPP were of the WPA now that the PPP had power. Once in power, Mrs. Jagan’s sympathy train became a semi-fascist bulldozer.
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Very strong words from Kissoon. I was not around in the ’57-’61 period, but I do believe, based on the ’92-’97 period, that Janet was upset with the split in the party and their subsequent jaunt in the wilderness, so she decided they were entitled to the power they got in ’92. They were wronged, they were robbed and therefore get the hell out of the way we are in charge now. In my opinion her power over Cheddi was, see you trusted Burnham, he stabbed you in the back, now you must listen to me.