The PPP and myth-making

Mar 09, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Peeping Tom…

Kaieteur News- The People’s Progressive Party (PPP), as it commemorates yet another anniversary of the failed attempt to rig the 2020 elections, takes great pleasure in reminding the public that it was the only bulwark against electoral theft. The party’s General Secretary has taken up the tired refrain that it was only a party like the PPP that could have resisted such an audacious heist.

The narrative is predictable, the myth-building meticulous, and the arrogance spectacular. In this version of history, the PPP alone is the hero, the rest merely footnotes in its grandiose tale of struggle. But myth and reality have never made good bedfellows, and history, in its relentless honesty, tells a different story.

The PPP’s claim to greatness collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. If the party were as politically astute as it proclaims, why did it lose power so embarrassingly in 1964? Cheddi Jagan, the party’s founder and ideological lodestar, did not fall victim to external machinations alone—he blundered into irrelevance. When Jagan, in what can only be described as a spectacular act of political naivety, signed an agreement that allowed the British to dictate the electoral system, he effectively handed power to his opponents.

The British, who had no love for Jagan’s Marxist inclinations, introduced proportional representation, a system that was unfavourable to the PPP. And just like that, the party was out of office.

For the next 28 years, the PPP languished in the political wilderness, unable to mount an effective challenge to Burnham’s People’s National Congress (PNC). Jagan’s long struggle for democracy yielded little beyond the occasional condemnation of rigged elections and the predictable pronouncements about the party’s commitment to socialist principles.

The PPP did not liberate Guyana from Burnham’s iron grip—Walter Rodney and the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) did more to shake the foundations of PNC rule than Jagan ever could. Yet, when the dust settled, and the PPP returned to power in 1992, it made no attempt to acknowledge the contributions of Rodney and the WPA. Instead, the party set about writing itself into the history books as the singular force of democratic resistance. If the PPP were a truly great party, it would have had the humility to recognize the sacrifices of others. Instead, it chose self-aggrandizement over honesty.

The PPP’s long struggle against the Burnham and Hoyte dictatorships was only successful because of international developments—most notably, the end of the Cold War—which made it fortuitous for the West to tolerate the former communist-styled PPP. Without the geopolitical shifts the PPP might have remained in opposition indefinitely. It was not superior strategy or political tenacity that brought the party back to power in 1992, but the changing winds of global politics.

The PPP’s mythology took further hits in the years following its return to power. From 1997 to 2008, the party was battered in the streets, its authority challenged not just by political opponents but by waves of politically motivated violence and criminal insurgency. The supposed ‘greatness’ of the party did little to prevent the reign of terror that descended upon the people. The PPP. and in particular Jagdeo, presided over one of the most violent periods in the country’s history.

Even in its most recent return to office, the PPP did not triumph through its own strength. In 2020, after that interminable five-month wait, the party had virtually given up on being declared the winner of the general and regional elections. It was only because the United States stepped in and called on the APNU+AFC to step aside that the party took office.

The PPP did not storm the gates of power through sheer determination or popular support as Jagdeo wants us to believe by recalling the protests of his party that led many of its supporters to be shot with pellets. He is over-dramatizing the effects of his supporters’ protests. And he fails to mention that during those protests, the party’s supporters attacked a busload of school children.

The PPP waited in limbo until external forces tilted the scales in its favour. And yet, the party continues to peddle the fiction of its indomitable fighting spirit.

But this is the myth-making style of the PPP, a party that tells its own story, in the way it insists and about its own indispensability. Bharrat Jagdeo has become the modern-day custodian of the PPP’s self-mythologizing tendencies. If Jagan was the architect of the party’s mythology, Jagdeo is its high priest, reciting its tenets with the zeal of a true believer. Today, as General Secretary of the PPP, he speaks with the same hubris, extolling the virtues of a party that has done everything in its power to construct a narrative of infallibility.

The party’s myth-making is not without purpose. By painting itself as the sole defender of democracy, the PPP effectively delegitimizes any challenge to its rule. For a party that claims to have fought for democracy, it is remarkably allergic to dissent, remarkably unwilling to admit that its record is anything but stellar.

A great party does not need to proclaim its greatness. It does not need to rewrite history to suit its narrative, nor does it need to dismiss the contributions of others in the struggle for democracy. The PPP, for all its bluster, remains a party trapped in the myths of its own making.

And as long as Jagdeo continues to spin these tales, the party will remain what it has always been: a legend in its own mind, but never in the annals of history.

(The PPP and myth-making)

(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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• bulwark, electoral theft, introduced proportional, Peeping Tom

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