Ramjattan and Nagamootoo: Quoting Shakespeare, Spinoza and Machiavelli

Jun 24, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Here is what the great philosopher, Spinoza once wrote of humans. “I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them but to understand them.” Three hundred years after Spinoza endeavoured to comprehend the things humans do, someone like Sigmund Freud wrote that he never really understood the full scope of human behaviour.
In the macabre election saga playing out on the world stage in Guyana, could one make sense of what people like Moses Nagamootoo and Khemraj Ramjattan are doing? It may be more relevant to quote Machiavelli and Shakespeare in our attempt to grasp exactly what these men are made of.
Machiavelli observed; “All men are evil and they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits.” Unbelievable, incredible things are coming from the mouths of Ramjattan and Nagamooto. One would like to think that if Spinoza was alive today he would have hit a brick wall in understanding a nation named Guyana.
Ramjattan in a 50-minute oral perambulation to his ministerial senior staff acknowledged that the 2020 election was lost by his party and wanted to say a special thanks to them for cooperation rendered during his tenure. Days before, writing a column in the Chronicle, he justified the rigged 2020 process. In his Chronicle piece, unambiguous grammar was used by Ramjattan in his conclusion that the election cannot have a declaration because too many anomalies vitiated the entire process.
One should not fault Ramjattan for moving away from his conclusions in the Chronicle article because people change their minds all the time based on new knowledge. Just as he was pellucid in condemning the 2020 election result in favour on the PPP, in his address to his staff he was crystal clear that his party lost to the PPP. He even used the words to the effect that the PPP won by 15, 000 votes.
The very next day, Ramjattan went on an APNU+AFC programme and reverted to his Chronicle adumbration, repeating his outline as contained in his Chronicle column. What words can one use to describe such behaviour? I have lived under autocratic governments in Guyana and there is no parallel with Ramjatan’s egregiousness that can be cited. Only Machiavelli’s quote has relevance here. How does one explain these contents living inside a human mind? I cannot think of any politician from colonial days passing right through 54 years of independent Guyana that have exhibited these mental irrationalities.
Moses Nagamootoo in the same Chronicle of March 8 wrote; “in the 2020 elections 473,352 persons voted, as against 412,012 in 2015. From those numbers, the APNU+AFC polled 237,004 votes and the PPP/C 229,344, which gives the former a narrow lead of 7,660 votes. Again, it was a narrow margin as in 2015. And when computed, the unofficial projection is that the Coalition would again have a one-seat majority in the National Assembly”.
After the CARICOM team concluded its observation, valid counted votes showed that the PPP won the contest by 15,000 votes a reality his AFC colleague, Khemraj Ramjattan, admitted to his ministerial staff. Now Nagamootoo has embraced the report of Lowenfield which concludes that the APNU+AFC won the election by a huge majority even beating the PPP in Berbice. Even the rigged election of 68, 73, 80, and 85 did not reflect a PPP loss in Berbice. In fact, since 1957 including all the fraudulent elections under Burnham, the PPP has won every general and local government contest in Berbice.
The obvious thing for Nagamotoo to do is to embrace decency and obligation and explain to the Guyanese people how he arrived at his figures that he published in the Chronicle and how he square them with the CARICOM pronouncement on the recount and Lowenfield’s Draculean outputs. We have gone to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), as I stated in my column yesterday that we would.
Nagamootoo, Ramjattan and their APNU+AFC outfit keep losing in the CCJ because those top jurists are immune from the degenerate intricacies of Guyanese political sociology. Nagamootoo will not get his wish because GECOM has now suspended statutory meetings until the CCJ’s decision. The end is coming soon because CCJ will rule against them again.
But Nagamootoo knows full well that even if by some weird logic, Granger was sworn in, the era of APNU+AFC has come to an end. Sanction will result in their political destruction. It is fitting to end with the application of a quote from Shakespeare to Ramjattan and Nagamootoo, “Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water” (from Henry V111).

(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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