Clive Thomas can damage his credibility

Aug 24, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon, News

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Former PPP Minister now a columnist, Dr. Henry Jeffrey, quoted from one of his articles a year ago to show that he made the identical suggestion that Clive Thomas recently advanced of giving a percentage of oil money in cash form to poor citizens. Thomas’s identical statement elicited and still is evoking polemical emanations.
Obviously, the question is why Jeffrey’s original declaration did not provoke the debates that Thomas’s has. Thomas is a national icon, although I must qualify that by saying icons can inflict damage on their own legacies, as with Jagan and Burnham and several others in Guyana and around the world. Because of his iconic status, Thomas’s repetition of what Jeffrey wrote had to resonate with people. Even our young population has knowledge of the eminent standing of Thomas as both professor and political fighter.
Thomas is now in the news daily. He even appeared at his party’s (WPA) press conference to defend his proposal of cash to the poor. But in the waves of discussions that are now going on, two things have happened that based on how Thomas copes with them, he can permanently damage his credibility. Has Thomas not done so already? I hope not. Of these two things, one is political, the other is cultural.
The first one is an official letter from the WPA in the newspapers defending Thomas’s cash transfer and took on tones of abuse and crass political opportunism. I will ignore those sections that throw scorn on those that rejected Thomas’s advocacy. Parts of this letter are so nasty in its propaganda that it constitutes increasing evidence that the WPA has seriously degenerated to levels that match anything that has occurred in the two major parties in the past and at the present.
I quote from the WPA’s output; “We wish to express our unswerving support for the way Roopnaraine and Thomas have discharged their duties in pursuit of implementing government policy in the areas of state which fall under their watch.” This assertion is not only disgraceful but morally repugnant. In terms of our atrophied political culture that underlined this country for over seventy years, this opinion is nothing but a crass, indecent insult to the people of Guyana.
In no other country in the world, would the media, political society, the intellectual community and civil society tolerate the absolute abomination that Roopnaraine and the WPA have thrown on Guyana. It was this very WPA that rejected the President’s statement that in Cabinet appointments in May 2015, he consulted the WPA on the WPA’s choice of Minister. So who chose Roopnaraine? Secondly, Roopnaraine resigned from the Cabinet then reversed his departure and the WPA issued a press release that stated that Roopnaraine did not inform the WPA that he was going back into government.
The Roopnaraine affair is a sordid one and the WPA is silent on it and so too is Roopnaraine. The only public statement that Roopnaraine has made since then is his views on V.S. Naipaul at a PPP-sponsored talk at the Cheddi Jagan Research Institute this week. It is comical opinion to say that Roopnaraine’s two-year performance as Education Minister was plausible much less outstanding. The WPA should offer a score card on Roopnaraine’s current performance in the Ministry of the Presidency. Exactly what does he do there?
It was under Clive Thomas’s chairmanship of GuySuCo that thousands of sugar workers lost their jobs in one swoop. Now even if the loss was unavoidable, there had to be a replacement income. But even the workers’ severance pay was not forthcoming. Three WPA heroes were so incensed at what happened that they wrote a condemnatory letter that aroused the anger of Thomas. They are Andaiye, Moses Bhagwan and Eusi Kwayana.
Space has run out. We cannot expand on the second thing that Thomas has to cope with that I refer to as the cultural factor. That will be left for another column in which I will call on Thomas, who is now engaged in discussing his cash generosity proposal, to answer certain questions about the economic policies of his government in the context of his great struggle decades ago for the working people.
I close citing a nasty piece of political output by the WPA in its long letter; “Minister Jaipaul Sharma joins PPP leader, Bharrat Jagdeo, in labeling the cash-transfer proposal a gimmick aimed at getting votes. We wonder which party he thinks will benefit from this so-called gimmick. If you have nothing fit and proper to say, then say nothing.”
This is what the WPA has become. You help the cause of the PPP if and when you criticize the government.

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