I am questioning David Granger’s sincerity

Sep 24, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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I don’t believe the PPP and the entity named APNU+AFC can deliver transformative horizons. They both are stuck in old, ethnic politics, imprisoned in the old political culture that was born after Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan became political adversaries in the mid-1950s.
It is ironic that one can make the statement about APNU+AFC stuck in ethnic politics, when the party of Walter Rodney and the multi-racial AFC are part of the power establishment. The glowing truth is that both the WPA and AFC have sacrificed their souls on a Faustian journey with one of the two ethnic Leviathans. The WPA and the AFC are now evanescent footnotes in Guyana’s history.
Even though I supported the no-confidence vote, I broke with my own conscience and decided to offer David Granger my vote. I put a condition that all Guyanese should have supported. I wrote that if Granger intervened in the madness that was destroying UG, I would see him as a patriot and give him my vote, (see my column of Sunday, January 13, 2019 headlined, “My vote for Granger depends on his action on UG.”
From the start of 2019 when I made that commitment to President Granger, he never lifted a finger to halt the deterioration, wild, colossal waste of limited funds, and ostentatious leadership that lacked competence at UG. When the Vice Chancellor’s contract came up for renewal in June this year, all three governmental representatives on the UG Council – Ministries of Education and Finance, and Vincent Alexander representing the Government of Guyana – voted for contract renewal.
This same president, addressing an African-Guyanese forum last Sunday, told his audience that he intends for Guyana, under his presidency, to have high-quality education from nursery to university. The president’s sincerity can be questioned by every Guyanese in and out of the territory.
How does the president want high-quality education when the quality of our education at our only university has declined under his tenure? Last week, it didn’t make the news, but the sewage system at UG suffered a breakdown.
UG lecturer Charlene Wilkinson, who campaigned for Mr. Granger’s party in 2015, released a devastating critique of the quality of UG education. I will quote briefly from her open appeal to the university community. She intoned; “I have been back home ten years now, and I have seen low levels at UG, but this here is very low. UG is being battered and raped before our eyes”.
For the past three years these things occurred under the presidency of David Granger, whose administration voted in June for the contract renewal of Vice Chancellor (he has since resigned) Ivelaw Griffith. Can one take Granger seriously when he speaks of his policy of ushering a period of quality education from baby school to university level?
One of the things that amuse me about my fellow Guyanese is how their voices reverberated till to Timbuktu when Jagdeo and Ramotar ruled Guyana, but there must be a plague battering Guyana, because these people’s voices are gone. Is a certain virus wiping out the voices of Guyanese?
If Jagdeo had run down UG and then spoken emotionally of wanting UG to be a top-class institution, he would have met with systematic derision. If the courts had ruled that a minister was in contempt of court and should be jailed, and Jagdeo used hegemonic authority derived from the constitution to overrule the courts, all hell would have broken loose.
Mr. Granger obviously is on the campaign trail, but he should select issues that he can wax lyrical about. Not issues that when he speaks on them, he chips away at his own credibility. He gave assurance that he would honour the results of the election. But he didn’t obey the constitution. He tossed aside a certain article of the constitution that embodied the Carter formula and had to be taken to court.
He arrogated to himself the right to interpret the words of judges. This remains one of the most dangerous turns on the highway of authoritarianism. He said the words “cooperation with the Opposition Leader”, by the President of the CCJ, mean that he too must submit six names for the GECOM chair for the Opposition Leader to decide. In doing that, Granger has now turned certain articles in the constitution in the opposite direction.
Granger is continuing in overdrive mode on that regrettable highway. He tells the nation something like this, “Look, no court has named a date for the election, so why should I set a date?” The courts did. They said three months after the no-confidence vote elections must he held. They are still to be held.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)

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