The Freudian mind of the PPP

Mar 12, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The announcement at Babu Jaan didn’t come. The PPP is on auto-pilot. The PPP is in self-destruct mode. This means the PPP will not be in power in 2019. But could it get power in 2019? I honestly don’t know. But the Jagdeoite PPP is not doing anything to make that possibility and that probability come to life.
Guyana is facing an imminent election. A party with a sordid past and gargantuan baggage has to reshape its image to win that election. It is becoming pellucid with the passing of each day that the Freudian carcinoma that has been eating away at the PPP since Jagan’s horrendous strategic mistakes in the fifties is still chewing at the liver of the PPP.
The exceptional moment for the PPP was 1991. The Cold War was over. China and Vietnam were not interested in communist command economies. Russia had now become a capitalist country. Cuba had to do soul-searching as it never did before. But still the Americans did not trust Cheddi Jagan and the WPA. So what did Uncle Sam do?
It did away with the WPA, approved of a PPP Government but insisted that Jagan must solemnly pursue two pathways – embrace unconditionally neo-liberal economics even deepening the structural adjustment programme of President Hoyte and share power with a group of people referred to as the Civic Component.
It only lasted a few years. Under Mrs. Janet Jagan, Roger Luncheon and Bharrat Jagdeo, the PPP pursued directions and underwent character transformation that the Americans were uneasy with. The Wikileaks cables release is a fantastic goldmine for those who want to write about that period of the PPP’s history.
The Americans decided to look for alternatives. The US literally invented and bankrolled the Alliance For Change (AFC) because it didn’t respect and wanted to work with the PNC under Robert Corbin. When Granger took over the PNC, the US got a double whammy. The decision to remove the Jagdeoite PPP was made. Perhaps the most graphic evidence of this was the one-vote situation in Region Eight that caused the PPP to lose the majority in Parliament.
PPP leaders were only left to physically maul GECOM Chairman Surujbally over a recount. They literally coerced, commandeered and begged him to order a recount. But the US Embassy’s shadow was the only thing Surujbally saw when he opened his eyes. The rest is history. We come now to two dates in the 2019 calendar that support the theory that the PPP will not be in power in 2019.
The first one is January 19. Irfaan Ali is elected to become the PPP’s presidential candidate. The explosive news was overshadowed the next day by what Frank Anthony and Vindya Persaud told close relatives and friends – they were asked to withdraw. This columnist has incontrovertible evidence of this admission by Anthony and Persaud. The second date is last Sunday – March 10.
Not one of the speakers turned back the clock and reassured the world that the PPP during the Jagdeo and Ramotar presidencies (or is it singular – Jagdeo presidency 1999-2015?) is not the same PPP in 2019. No apologies came from any speaker lamenting some mistakes of the period that Jagdeo and Ramotar reigned in.
Speaker after speaker displayed the Freudian mind on the podium last Sunday that Cheddi Jagan shaped the PPP since he won the 1957 election. It goes like this – the PPP is the political vanguard of Guyana, it is unbeatable and irrepressible. It will suffer setbacks but will rise from the ashes like the Phoenix. The PPP will always win.
From Sam Hinds, the longest serving Prime Minister in Guyana, to Bharrat Jagdeo, the longest serving executive president in this country, there was no necessity, no requirement, no obligation to invoke regrets of the past.
Jagdeo lost an election in 2011 when he installed Ramotar over the winnable candidacy of Ramkarran. Jagdeo lost another election in 2015 when he insisted that the PPP did not lose in 2011; it is only that Berbicians did not vote because they felt the PPP would have won anyway. So Jagdeo refused to change Ramotar in the 2015 poll, the most lackluster head of government the Caricom region ever experienced even more that Bernard St. John in Barbados and George Chambers in Trinidad.
In 2015, Jagdeo lost another election. In 2019, Jagdeo chose Mr. Ali over winnable candidates like Anthony, Persaud and the towering personality of a learned lawyer, Anil Nandlall.
In 2019 Jagdeo will lose another election. Jagdeo is living out the Freudian instincts of 1957. The PPP can never lose.
The PPP will always win. Of course not only is the PPP self-destructive, the man, Jagdeo is also.

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