PPP V. PNCR – internals

Apr 15, 2024 The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – This much must be said for the PPP: dare to blink at the wrong time and the offending head is sure to roll on a dime. Try stepping out of line and that man or woman had better be prepared to lose a chunk of spine. Speak out of turn and the result is of a comrade trashed to ashes in an urn. Is that a machine, or is that a machine?  Well-oiled. Sweetly purring. Smartly stepping. Externally, as Guyanese have seen. It is an even more rigid regime internally. There is the iron control of the man with the whip hand and the goodies bag. Tenure and taking hold of each insider by the scruff of the neck. Or seat of the pants.  Or skirt.

Everyone knows the business of what is required.  It is that they must all speak with one mind, one mouth, and in one manner.  Not a fingernail painted, other than in PPP red.  Not a mouth smeared in any colour beside lipstick red.  In keeping with nature’s delicate balance, the lipstick splotches include the men.  It is all for one and one for all.  No matter what.  It is a formula for leadership conquest and individual success.  There is history.  Since Moses, the same one who aspires to be me, there has been one notable departure.  His name is Khemraj.  How is that for keeping people in check, ensuring that progressive is the name of the game, and the party is paramount to all.  The party is the greater truth and integrity, the party is more than family and personal longevity (refer to the fateful end of Satyadeo), the party is of an incomparably supremely higher calling that any duty or any people.  With Jagan, there was leeway of legroom.  With Jagdeo, there is Star Chamber and Death Chamber.  Put that generational line of Kims from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea together and Jagdeo makes them look like jokers.  Control!  To paraphrase the calypsonian: talk about control, and Jagdeo is it.  This is why the People’s Progressive Party functions with more military discipline than the GDF.  The reins of total control and the culture of absolute submission inside the PPP is why there is no need for a stockade or brig in that well-drilled, well-directed, well-deboned political army.  I am moved to remove my hat in homage.

Then there is the People’s National Congress. If it cannot have the orderliness to be about its own business, the people inside, how in god’s name, it could be about the Guyanese people? Any segment of them? When there is the present difficulty in getting its internal affairs together, as a party, it eludes me regarding how it could be about the national?  And, if its ideas of familiar internal congress are so disjointed and disintegrated from this early stage, then when can there ever be what is representative of a national congress of the peoples?  I look for discipline and find fragments.  I ask who is in charge, and everybody is in charge of himself.  Everyone harbours ambitions of being number one; the party has run out of numbers.  The PNC is a Tower of Babel: every man and woman speaks his or her own language.  Subtitles are needed, subplots abound, and substitutions occur in the runup to the first ball about to be bowled.  The word is that the chief cooks and bottlewashers behind the 2020 fiasco are behind the upheavals. My god, my god, what has thou done to Guyana?  The PPP is bad enough, but two, lord?

 

If I were to vote, Jagdeo now looks a world apart.  But remember, that is the duty of the Guyanese people, not me.  I sit on no fence, for I care for no one, shelter behind no such structure.  Somebody should drag me out of the dungeons of electoral retirement.  It might be better to drag me back to America.  I just remembered: Donald Trump.  What have I done to deserve this?  I have heard about being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.  But that pales into nothing compared to the Guyana (my) situation.  It is being caught between a stalking Komodo dragon, a hungry Amazonian crocodile, and a Great White.  All the terrible things, I have lived in this life have finally caught with me: PPP, PNC, Trump.

 

The PPP has its internal act together, which is the worst living nightmare for Guyanese.  The PNC can’t put one foot in front of the other internally.  The result is that this transforms the PPP into the unimaginable and the incomparable: a still worse nightmare.  I think I have to break my vows and run for power in this country.  Note that I say power and not office.  The former is about all the personal possibilities, the latter about responsibilities.  Guess which one I will take?  C’mon folks, the one from Jagdeo’s book, of course.  He gets his people to jump up and down without a word of command.  Now, that is power.  The PNC have people jumping around, and for what, not one damn one of them knows.  Call it internal dynamics in both parties.  For me, it is practising internal medicine.

 

(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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• Chief of Staff of the Guyana Defence Force (GDF), Donald Trump, GDF, GHK Lall, Jagdeo, PNC

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