Christmas with Charrandass Persaud

Dec 25, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

My very good friend of 30 years, Charrandass Persaud, has inserted his name on the Christmas calendar of this country. Last Christmas, Charran took Guyana by storm by voting for the opposition’s no confidence vote (NCV). The objective was to bring about an election three months after.
Charran said yes to the NCV days before Christmas, and in so doing, filled the 2018 Christmas atmosphere with his name.
Guyana is an insane, negative, incredible, unbelievable, infamous, immoral, shambolic, destroyed, surreal land whose attacks on modern civilisation and modern humanity have no parallel around the globe in the 21st century. Can one imagine that one year ago a NCV was passed and it is as if it never happened?
The President of the CCJ asked the question as to why GECOM didn’t get into preparation mode after the NCV was passed around Christmas 2018. Months after the NCV, GECOM was as inactive as the volcano that destroyed Pompeii thousands of years ago. What more evidence does one want to prove that this is a most bizarre nation on Planet Earth?
As we celebrate Christmas 2019, Charran is still with us, but not his NCV that he was accused of taking money to bring to a reality. His NCV is gone. Last year, Christmas was dominated by Charran and the NCV. This year the NCV has disappeared, which brings up an interesting dimension – if Charran took money then he got a huge jackpot. You see, because the NCV did not curtail APNU+AFC’s tenure – elections will be held two months before May, which was the time of the general election in 2015 – then Charran got billions freely. If you believe he was bribed, then he has to give back his benefactors their money and give me some before he does so.
Everything about the presence, shape and continuation of the ruling formation in office is neatly intact, as if there was no NCV in 2018. Can one imagine a similar situation in any other country that does not have a military dictatorship?
I have been involved in political activism my entire life. As a trained academic I have studied Guyanese politics all my life. I say without even an infinitesimal pause that if anyone from any part of the world should ask me to point to even a tiny spot in the exercise of power that was affected by the NCV, I will be unable as both an activist and academic to do so. There are no signs in the exercise of power by APNU+AFC in Guyana since Christmas last year that would tell a human from another country that an NCV was passed a year ago.
It is Christmas 2019, and Charran refuses to erase his name from the ambience of Christmas. He wants his name to still be floating around this time of the year. So a few days ago he wrote a long overdue letter to explain to the Guyanese people why he gave his legal imprint to the Opposition’s NCV. But do you think the timing was not important? Why he did not compose his correspondence early this year? Or middle of this year?
He chose the anniversary of the NCV and the NCV’s anniversary falls four days before Christmas. One of his reasons, as stated in his missive, was what the government did to 7,000 sugar workers. They closed some of the estates, putting those numbers out of employment. Charran explained that when you add up the families of 7,000 sugar workers, then 28,000 persons are without an anticipated income.
This is where the significance of this Christmas comes in. On the 25th anniversary of the founding of Kaieteur News in April, Mr. Yesu Persaud took the podium after me. He pointed out that I did not mention the plight of those 7,000. I didn’t see the relevance given the subject matter I was dealing with when I spoke – the contexualisation of Kaieteur News’s importance to Guyana. But I do understand Yesu’s feelings.
I must be honest and say that as an academic, I support the substantial reduction of the sugar industry. Also it was being subsidised by the PPP so as to ensure the permanency of at least seven parliamentary seats. But I cannot accept the denial of the benefits of those sugar workers which were not given after their retrenchment and they had to take the government to court. I am still in an emotional tantrum on why those workers were not generously given the lands of those closed estates. They must be given them. On this day, my heart genuinely goes out to those 28,000 souls.

(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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