Mark Benschop exposes the PPP’s moral rut

May 08, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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The PPP has been a clown on parade since it lost power. Not a day passes in this country without the PPP putting on several shows that picture them as clowns in a circus. In fact, it is three years since the PPP lost power, making this show the longest running circus ever to visit Guyana. Of course the circus isn’t visiting, it is from Guyana itself. What it is visiting are all the regions, districts, towns, cities and villages in Guyana.
The lead acts in the daily performances are Bharrat Jagdeo, Donald Ramotar, Leslie Ramsammy, Juan Edghill, Hydar Ally, Anil Nandlall. Except for Jagdeo, all the other names here have a missive published at least once a week in the newspapers denouncing negative, undemocratic, ill-shaped aspects of governance. But when you read on, these very accusations that the circus performers cite were daily outputs of the Jagdeo/Ramotar hegemony.
The latest act in this clownish acrobatics is Jagdeo. He came out swinging against the inclusion of the charge of sedition in the Cybercrime Bill. But Mark Benschop replied to Jagdeo. Benschop showed that it was under Jagdeo as president that he and others were charged with sedition over a seven year period – Benschop and others in 2001 then, in 2008, Oliver Hinckson. Benschop’s letter published in the newspapers directly addressed Anil Nandlall’s rejection of the crime of sedition still being on the shelf of the laws of Guyana, but it was Jagdeo who was the President when the charges were instituted and Nandlall was the Attorney-General. Now surely, the decent thing to do is for the PPP leadership to show statesmanship and directly apologize to Benschop. But it is not going to do it, because that is the nature of the current PPP leadership
Now there is an interesting aspect of Benschop’s letter. Hinckson was charged for sedition after he met Nandlall and attorney Euclid Gomes (Nandlall’s law firm associate) in a confidential conversation. What did Hinckson say to the then Attorney-General that caused him to have Hinckson arrested? For the deluge of letters they write in the media and the weekly press conferences Jagdeo holds, the clowns do not discuss their fifteen years in power.
Could Nandlall be transparent and tell us why a confidential dialogue with Hinckson on the then crime wave in Guyana resulted in Hinckson having to spend a year on remand on a sedition rap brought about by Attorney-General Anil Nandlall and President Jagdeo. Why is it that no PPP member has requested that Jagdeo explain to the nation what Philip Bynoe gave him in exchange for being pardoned for treason?
These circus performers are carrying on their acts in public and the society is not pressuring them to come clean about when they dominated Guyana for fifteen years after Jagdeo was handed the presidency in August 1999 by an ailing Janet Jagan.
The clowns think the Guyanese people are fools. Here is Ramotar in one of the dozens of letters he writes every month; “I have not been doing so (replying to Kissoon) since he has no constituency and, therefore, has no responsibility for people’s welfare. He has the luxury to be very irresponsible. He does not have a constituency.” This was Ramotar’s reply (of April 5) to a column in which I accused him of denying attorney Gino Persaud (now High Court judge) the role of CEO of a foreign company (Credit Bureau) that was about to set up office here.
Persaud did not get the job, although he was technically employed as the CEO, though the company was not in receipt of the licence to operate in Guyana. The operative word in Ramotar’s reply here is “constituency.” If PPP leaders have constituencies, then aren’t these constituencies owed explanations for unjust and unfair things Jagdeo and Ramotar did to the nation?
If a party currently in opposition denounces the inclusion of sedition charges in an anti-crime Bill, then, for people who criticize the government for that legislation and when that party was in power used the same sedition mechanism to arrest, charge and prosecute its critics, fundamental human decency should compel them to admit to the Guyanese people that it was a mistake. This is what is sickening about the entire PPP leadership.
No one in that leadership has even a modicum of ethical fibre to admit to mistakes made for the fifteen years Jagdeo and Ramotar ran this country. It is time every PPP supporter wherever they are in and out of Guyana demand this obligation from the PPP, an obligation that philosophically inheres in civilization and whose recognition by humans enables human society to remain civilized.

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