Trotman put a jumbie lash pon Ramjattan

May 17, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I grew up very rough in south Georgetown. Fights were common. I don’t think I ever won one. A scrawny kid like me could never win a fight in those days. All the boys on D’urban Street know that if you beat up someone, you better look out for a jumbie lash coming when you least expect it.

Freddie Kissoon

In Wortmanville, despite your show-off behaviour, you never would want to get a jumbie lash.
Jumbie lash is a serious man. Every bully in the ghetto is afraid of a jumbie lash. You will never recover. Last Monday, Raphael Trotman put a jumbie lash pon Khemraj Ramjattan that, dem boy seh, Ramjattan ain’t come off his bed since.
“On the front page of Jagdeo’s newspaper, “The Bobby Times,” for Monday, May 13, is a photograph of the two percent royalty man with the caption; “Multiple contestants for PM slot counter-productive – Trotman.”
The article quotes Trotman as saying, “For the record, we have an incumbent Prime Minister and at least one person expressing interest in the same position. I don’t believe that it would serve the coalition’s interest if there were multiple aspirants for what is essentially one position,”
There was more to come with Trotman directly pointing his finger in the direction of Ramjattan.
Trotman went on to say; “The AFC has not put forward an alternative name to Moses, and right now I am not sure if anyone feels that he or she can do a better job by winning more votes nationally and has national acceptability.”
Surely, this is a jumbie lash. Trotman is not implying but overtly stating that there is no one in the AFC that has more political capital than Nagamootoo.
Then Trotman hit below the belt with this observation; “The no-confidence motion was a direct challenge on the Granger/Nagamootoo leadership. In my view, if we were to jump to replace either gentleman in an emotive way, we would be openly conceding that the motion and vote were justified and valid.”
This is a colossal acrobatic leap by Trotman but it is essentially a direct confrontation with Ramjattan. By tying the no-confidence vote (NCV) to any challenge to Nagamootoo, Trotman is accusing AFC aspirants of betrayal. This is a strategy that could backfire for both Trotman and Nagamooto in the context of people’s right to want to achieve higher office.
Many in the AFC could argue that in tying the NCV to the right to challenge Nagamootoo, it means, then, that the AFC has to accept Nagamootoo whether he performs or not and has no right to rotate the prime minister position under the Cummingsburg Accord. But there are more conspiratorial dimensions to this drama.
In February 2015 when the Accord was signed, Nagamootoo, at the Georgetown Club, told the gathering that he was interested in one term only. As the AFC settled into office, it was generally accepted in the AFC hierarchy that Nagamooto would only serve one term.
His health deteriorated in 2018 and that further confirmed the thinking of one term. It is against this background that Trotman surprised the AFC membership when after its national executive meeting in February, Trotman told the Chronicle that the meeting has endorsed Nagamootoo for a second term.
Some top AFC persons were enraged and that is putting it mildly. They said there wasn’t even a word at the meeting about the PM slot for the 2020 election so they could not understand where Trotman got the idea from. But Trotman knew what he was doing. In making that announcement in February, Trotman had started his campaign for Nagamootoo.
The AFC will have its congress in a month’s time and from what this columnist has been told conspiracy to tamper with the delegate selection process has already began.
There have been three elections in Berbice for leadership of the Berbice branch with fights and battles between pro-Ramjattan supporters and pro-Trotman people. Derek Basdedo of the Region Six executive of the AFC told me that I can quote him as saying that Trotman bandwagon bussed in people who were ineligible to vote. There was a repeat of the Beribce war in Bartica where two elections have already been held.
Abel Seetaram of the AFC in Region Five told me he is fearful that the delegate selection process will not be fair. He said it wasn’t free and fair for the January 2017 congress in Vreed-en-Hoop.
Gobin Harbhajan, AFC point man in Region Six, told me his name was deliberately omitted for the January 2017 congress. More on why Trotman is backing Nagamootoo against Ramjattan later. The AFC is yesterday’s news.

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