Granger and Trump knew about Tsipras but couldn’t learn the lesson

Nov 10, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – When you go through history and you see what horrible, sick tyrants, some revolutionaries, became with the intoxication of ugly power, you wonder if leaders can ever come good. Of course, there are exceptions – Mandela, Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic.
I get a lot of ideas for my column when I am alone with my dog on the seawall. Recently, on the wall, I sat on one of those riprap boulders while my pet wandered around and while reflecting on the election rigging, I thought about the pathetic moral degeneracy in the politics of Walter Rodney’s closest friends. The idea came to me to write a column asking the question if Walter Rodney had achieved power if he would have remained the same dreamy revolutionary.
I had a rough draft in my head with the conclusion that maybe the middle-class ambience that Rodney clothed himself in would have led him astray from his ideals had he become president. I was serious about composing that column, but I came home and just abandoned the idea. It was because my idea was premised on what Rodney’s closet comrades became and not on any action of Rodney himself.
The curiosity is still inside my head. Look at how revolutionaries became unrepentant tyrants. The list is voluminous. Kaddafi overthrew the Libyan monarch and became a billion times worse than the king. Iran should have stayed with the Shah of Iran. Comparing repression in post-Shah Iran with the days of the Shah is comparing rotting biscuit to the best bar of chocolate.
The revolutionary that became the head of government in Angola, Jose Dos Santos, became one of the most corrupt men in modern governmental history. The army in Zimbabwe removed famed guerrilla leader turned president, Robert Mugabe, who wanted to rule forever. Fidel Castro executed more anti-government activist in one year than the entire tenure of President Baptista that he overthrew. Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua can be termed guerrilla turned tyrant. These are just six examples from an inexhaustible list. How do opposition figures deteriorate so badly when power is achieved? The answer is one that will come easily to even a primary school kid – power corrupts and destroys soul, mind and body.
Two recent examples around the same time are worth noting. Both President David Granger and Donald Trump came to power around the same time. Both were carried to victory because the electorates of the two countries wanted a horizon without any resemblance with the past.
In the 2016 campaign Trump invented a slogan that was a winner – “drain the swamp.” The slogan was a winner because Americans wanted a break from leaders who they feel were Washington D.C. dealers. But more importantly, the Washington politicians were seen as big business people. Trump in 2016 voiced an exclamation that Guyanese since the seventies were familiar with that very statement – “make the small man a real man.”
Trump was destined to lose because he made the rich richer. Whoever was advising Trump should have been honest with him and let him know that he didn’t have the votes that came his way in 2016. Analysts are already concluding that large numbers of poorer White folks who rooted for Trump in 2016 voted for Biden.
The situation is identical in Guyana. Granger came to power on a phenomenal wave of expectations from the Guyanese people. They wanted fundamental changes from the way governance was shaped under successive PPP presidents. Not only did Granger, Raphael Trotman and Khemraj Ramjattan stalled in inventing new horizons, with each passing day, it was difficult to distinguish the difference between Guyana under the PPP and Guyana under the APNU+AFC.
Unless Trump rigged the poll, he was bound to lose. Unless Granger rigged the 2020 election, he was bound to lose. They both lost and claimed that they were cheated. This is where both presidents failed to internalize the lessons of Greece under Alexis Tsipras, the former Greek Prime Minister.
I did two columns on Tsipras – Wednesday, December 4, 2018 and Monday July 15, 2019. It was very easy to see that Tsipras would have won. It was equally easy to see he would lose the next election. Greece was reeling under draconian conditions imposed by the IMF and the EU for debt relief. Any political party that promised to cut off negotiations with the IMF and EU would have won the elections. Tsipras did and he won. When he became Prime Minister he accepted even harsher fiscal impositions. Losing the next election was commonsense.

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