The ship of fools sailing since August 2010, has a new captain

Apr 05, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The title for my column of Saturday, August 14, 2010 was “Ship of Fools.” In it, I wrote the following; “In Guyana, no other group symbolizes the meaning of ship of fools than the 15 member body that leads the PPP and makes policy for that party….” The ship is still sailing and almost nine years after it took to the water, it picked up a new captain with the name “Dual Citizen.”
The AFC held a press conference last Wednesday and introduced the media to the new captain of their ship of fools. The AFC declared that the constitution should be amended to allow persons who are Guyanese and have dual citizenship to become Members of Parliament. The ship of fools has now given itself an alternative appellation, “ship of asininity.”
The AFC person who made that pronouncement was Raphael Trotman. He is a lawyer and an important senior Cabinet Minister. Important Cabinet ministers who are also lawyers are Joe Harmon, Khemraj Ramjattan and Moses Nagamootoo. Only a jackass would believe that when the writs were being composed to challenge the no-confidence vote (NCV) in the courts that these top legal brains that sit in the war room were not consulted.
In fact, not only were they consulted, they probably helped to write the script. One of the challenges they put before the courts was that a dual citizen could not have voted because constitutionally a dual citizen cannot hold House membership. The passengers on the ship of asininity sat down and consciously asked the court to declare that a foreign national cannot be in the House as an MP.
Now the very passengers on the ship of fools want the constitution to be amended to allow Guyanese who also have foreign passports to become parliamentarians. Now why is the entire country talking about dual citizenship? Because the leaders of the APNU+AFC brought it up in the first place. Let’s offer a hypothetical case of political asininity.
The NDC built a housing scheme. People began to move in. The chairman of the NDC brings a motion before the council to stop the residents from constructing bridges that lead unto the main highway. He wants to avoid traffic accidents so your bridge has to connect to an internal road that you have to take to get to the main highway.
The chairman himself built the first house in the scheme and constructed his bridge to lead unto the highway. So the council passes the restriction. One day, security personnel stopped the chairman from using his bridge. The chairman gets furious. He goes to all the villagers and tell them that it is convenient to drive straight onto the highway instead of making a U-turn on some other street in the village.
The chairman is a congenital jackass. It was the chairman himself that asked for the restriction knowing full well his bridge leads unto the highway. This example fits the fools on the ship that runs this country. A simple alternative was to file a number of writs against Charran to stop the NCV and they could have taken the following forms – the NCV is illegal because Charran doesn’t use underwear; the NCV is illegal because Charran doesn’t use toothpaste; the NCV is illegal because Charran doesn’t use deodorant .
But it was the passengers on the ship of fools that brought up dual citizenship in the first place. It was these passengers that asked the court to banish Guyanese with foreign passports from the National Assembly. The court did just that and now Trotman and company want the constitution to be changed so that dual citizens can be allowed to be members of the House.
The obvious questions are; did Harmon see the writs that were being filed? Did Trotman object when the Attorney-General asked the court for a declaration against those who are in Parliament and have nationality status of other countries? Did Dominic Gaskin seek to alter the writs to delete the section citing Charran’s foreign status knowing that he, Gaskin has similar status?
What are people in Guyana, the Caribbean and the rest of the world saying after they heard what AFC leaders are asking for? But more importantly does Guyana deserve such mediocre leadership. The brutal reality is that if the APNU+AFC did not bring into sharp focus the illegality of foreign nationals sitting in Parliament, the courts would not have made a ruling on those foreign nationals and Guyanese would not have discussed it. The more we see the APNU+AFC in action, the more you wonder about the quality of its leaders.

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