Is Gail Teixeira fit and proper to be president?

Jan 15, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

There are five official presidential candidates in the PPP for the national elections to be held probably at some point in 2019 – Anil Nandlall, Irfaan Ali, Dr. Frank Anthony, Dr. Vindhya Persaud and the “old guardist”, Gail Teixeira. My preference is for Anil Nandlall. The last on my list is Gail Teixeira.
Theoretically, Vindhya Persaud should be given the nomination because this is the age of women and women need to lead countries the way men have the past few thousand years. At the practical, pragmatic and realistic level, I think Nandlall has a few edges over Dr. Persaud. If there wasn’t Nandlall in the race, I would go for Dr. Persaud.
I only know two of the five –Nandlall and Teixeira. Nandlall has been my student and friend. We fell out over the nature of the PPP government of which he was an essential part. Khemraj Ramjattan had been a friend long years now. I don’t think we share the same degree of friendship because the government he belongs to is not the right one for Guyana’s future.
My country is where my family is. My country’s well being transcends friendship. I believe Charrandass did what he did out of love for country. When I am shown evidence to the contrary, Charrandass will be condemned in these columns of mine.
Teixeira is someone I have interacted with from the seventies but she was never a friend. My suspicion of Teixeira as a closet Stalinist goes back to the eighties when we sat in the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy. I was one of the WPA’s representatives. She was a Cabinet minister from October 1992 to May 2015. She was a parliamentarian from 1992 and still is.
Ms. Teixeira has held many sensitive portfolios in the PPP itself since the seventies and several Cabinet posts. Her last Cabinet outing was governance advisor to president Jagdeo and Ramotar. If you are going to judge the suitability of Teixeira to be president of Guyana, then her role as governance advisor would surely disqualify her.
Simply put, the presidencies of Jagdeo and Ramotar were not accompanied by the passion for democratic thinking. What did Teixeira really advise those two presidents on?
If you do a comparative analysis of Teixeira, you will find that she was always a dyed in the wool Stalinist apparatchik. She inherited that instinct from Mrs. Jagan with whom she shared a sister bond. Mrs. Jagan was an unashamed embracer of communist authoritarianism. I know of no academic that has written positively of the role of Mrs. Jagan (see Frank Birbalsingh, “The PPP, 1950 -1992: An Oral History,” pp 85-91).
Sadly or maybe tragically, for a woman who lived in liberal democratic Canada, Teixeira became a prisoner of the Stalinist thinking of the PPP.
For this reason I think her presence among the other four contenders is incongruous. Frank Anthony has emerged as someone who is a flexible PPP leader that comes across as a nice gentleman. Irfaan Ali has earned negative ratings but does not have the baggage Teixeira carries.
It would be indecent to favourably compare Teixeira with Dr. Vindhya Persaud for the presidency. It is out of the question to think that Teixeira would be a better president than Anil Nandlall. In a clean voting system, Nandlall would win a landslide against Teixeira.
I knew Teixeira’s common-law husband, Fazal Khan (deceased) closely. I think he died a depressed and frustrated man over what the PPP had become as a government. Fazal was from the old school of the seventies where the influence of Walter Rodney penetrated and permeated people like him.
Why would the PPP’s central committee leaders choose Teixeira over the other four contenders when obviously, she belongs to an age where the thinking that dominated that era has become dangerous? Teixeira belongs to the school of “we versus them.” That kind of politics has destroyed Guyana.
We need the younger PPP leaders that have no connection with that sordid past. She lived in Canada for a long time but I don’t know if she is Canadian.
The question is of course why she put her name down. I think Guyanese and the PPP leaders know that she doesn’t stand a chance. So why contest. I think she was incited to do so for vote splitting reasons. If she was not there, the preference of the old guards (Rohee, Ramotar , Luncheon, Bheri Ramsarran, Clinton Collymore, Pauline Sukhai) may go to a nominee that a certain person doesn’t want. With those six votes going to Texieira, it decreases the chances of that person winning. I hope not.

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Is Gail Teixeira fit and proper to be president?

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