PPP leaders’ night of long knives

Apr 04, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Life is funny you know. Life can hit you hard, only to pick you up and hurl you onto a pedestal. The youngest puisne judge appointed in recent memory is Gino Persaud. At his age (he is in his thirties) he has a huge number of years on the bench if he chooses to stay. The fellow may end up as Chief Justice or Chancellor, though I feel a future government (God forbid, not this one or a PPP one) ought to abolish the office of chancellor.
If you are not familiar with the name of Gino Persaud, then you need to check up on the human rights abuse record of presidents Jagdeo and Ramotar (how can Guyanese forgive these two autocrats?). Mr. Persaud was identified by the foreign company, Credit Bureau, to head its office in Guyana. He was sent to Slovakia for training and was about to take up his post in New Market Street when the company was fully established here. President Ramotar intervened and indicated that his government would be unhappy with such a person, given the fact that he once headed the Guyana branch of Transparency International. Persaud lost out because of the autocracy of the PPP leadership.
I could go on to give literally hundreds of examples where good, Guyanese professionals were victimized by Jagdeo and Ramotar. Readers should ask the legal advisor to Minister Harmon, Geeta Chandan, why she is no longer a magistrate. This columnist knows of terrible things done by the Jagdeo and Ramotar presidencies for which there would be millions of lawsuits or my life would be under threat. One is just hoping and praying that before we go into the next election, these nasty things will become public through prosecution.
Last week I was on the beach with my dog and this young man, with a huge cigar in his mouth and dapperly dressed approached me. He introduced himself and when he did so, I detected the strong resemblance to his father, Rev. Denzil Hinds. Hinds, during the PPP government, was a PNC employee, and his wife was a magistrate (Elizabeth). For some reason the husband’s status affected the wife’s status. Young Hinds told me he still remembers those days of how the politics of Guyana affected his parents.
Young Hinds indicated that he is practicing law in St. Kitts. He asked if he could disturb me and my dog, because he had a legal theory he wanted to share with me and wanted me to write on it. I listened. Now I am writing on it. I am not a legal expert, though I find what Hinds told me plausible, but I will leave it up to the experts. Hinds could be wrong, he could be right.
His point is that the acceptance that Bharrat Jagdeo has immunity from prosecution is falsely premised. He argued that Jagdeo cannot be prosecuted for action that was directly related to state functions. According to Hinds, when the conduct of a president was done without any connection to state functionalism, then constitutional immunity does not apply. Hinds gave an example. If a former president physically harmed a woman when he was president, how is that related to his official duties as president?
I hope Hinds is right. It is unfortunate if he is wrong, because I believe many of the wrong things that Jagdeo and Ramotar did were not covered by state functions. From my layman’s knowledge, if a president told a governmental functionary that he must give a piece of public property to the president’s cousin, how can that be subsumed under his presidential duties?
The violations of the cabals of Jagdeo and Ramotar should never be allowed to become dormant, because of what the PPP leadership is doing – from the top men Jagdeo and Ramotar – to the unknown underling – posing as saints and democrats. The letter pages are filled with the adumbrations of Ramotar and other PPP leaders. Jagdeo holds a weekly press conference condemning acts of the current government that are obscure footnotes to what this man did when he ruled Guyana.
This column was motivated by the words of a PPP mandarin – Hydar Ally – in the Kaieteur News last week. Ally complains that his letters are not being carried. He ended his complaints with the following words – “…in the market place of ideas, let a thousand ideas bloom”. This man was a PPP Permanent Secretary from 1992 to 2015, making him one of the longest (if not the longest) serving PS in the history of Guyana. During his domination and that of his party the market place of ideas was replaced by the night of long knives.

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