Last week, latest evaluation – PPP’s Jagdeo

Aug 25, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

---

Kaieteur News – The president is a figurehead, and the vice president is the PPP’s force of nature; thus, the former stands diminished, living off the latter’s energies.  Therefore, in this final look at the major competitors in the September 1^st election, PPP General Secretary and Guyana’s Vice President,  Bharrat Jagdeo, is the one whose name must be called.  As he goes, so goes the PPP.  When he is persuasive on the campaign trail, the PPP odds of sneaking out a victory improve.  When he registers as a man stretching to grasp at any speck of elusive credibility, the PPP’s star takes a hit, darkens menacingly.

With campaigns now gathering strength for that final, climactic push to the finish line, how does Jagdeo and the PPP measure up, what does have to show?

He rolled the PPP record and his own for the last five years into one word: “performance.”  Roads.  Schools. Hospitals. Yessir.  The Guyanese that can afford to travel on those roads do so with a hollow stomach, a sinking feeling.  They are driving over billions in skullduggeries, billions from the last five national budgets that should have come to them to ease their cost-of-living traumas.  But there was a problem. The PPP Government cared more for concrete roads than its leaders cared for the cavities developing in the stomachs of poor Guyanese who can’t buy food.  Massive corruptions aside, there is no question that the PPP Government put on the kind of performance that sent and will continue to send cash-strapped and struggling citizens to the hospital.  Fill prescriptions, do tests, at private facilities.  The same hospitals that contestant Jagdeo craftily, boisterously gave the heading of “performance.”

A performance, indeed; and as a political performer-a phantom one, a whirling dervish one, or a Bollywood one-Bharrat Jagdeo is the best in the business.  Ever seen him gyrate?  It grates on the eyesight of the pros: a performer, for sure, but one that’s of a low, cheap, type.  A dime a dozen, with a dollar leftover as change.

But there is one area, one aspect, of the performance that GS and VP, Jagdeo, should boast about, but which he was too shy to take credit for, in this countdown to next Monday’s elections.  In a baby’s booty, there was nobody, and I mean nobody, who performed as well as Mr. Jagdeo.  Legends and wannabe legends are left mesmerized and tongue-tied by the vice president performance record of the last five years.  He was aggressive, for which I give him a pass, since that isn’t abnormal in the demands of governance.

But Jagdeo went beyond what is ordinarily aggressive.  He was abusive.  He seemingly took a special delight in being skin crawlingly repulsive also.  Anyone paying scant attention to the PPP’s leading spokesman could not avoid concluding how being repulsive was almost compulsive to him.  The man is a natural performer in that regard.  Those are going to cost the PPP some votes that it can least afford to lose.  Jagdeo twisted himself into such mad dog contortions that Guyanese with any sense of decency in them turned their backs on him long ago.  What does the man have to hide that he carries on in those ways?

Ask him about the many contract awards that made no sense and he dilly-dallied about criteria, evaluators, and processes of which he was proud, while more billions disappeared.  Is this leader Jagdeo, a master performer, or what?  Ask him about his baby, the Wales gas-to-energy GY$400 billion, and he performs like an absentee father.  He knows nothing, has nothing to prove its paternity, nothing but more prevarications, put-offs, and putdowns.  That’s what Guyanese get for their GY$400 billion, another patented Jagdeo jig, what he calls performance.  He doesn’t care how long past the delivery date a school takes, or how quickly new roads crumble.  He brags about performance.  I think that he has set himself up and the PPP for enormous pain.  When he narrowed the elections to a referendum on himself, he served the PPP’s goose raw to the dogs.

Given all the rich resources that the PPP and the nation’s chief policymaker had in their hands, September 1^st should have been their date with a foregone conclusion -victory.  Resounding victory.  Victory that could have been declared from today, six days before September 1^st.  Due to the shady performance of the ruling party, its record can only be charitably described as laced through with felonies, conmen, and quacks.  Hence, the PPP doesn’t have a date with victory, but one with destiny.  Jagdeo’s ‘outright’ victory is the rambling of a delirious man on life support, who dreams that he is an Olympic gold medalist.  He may have been but the PPP teef out all the de gold.  Quite a performance, I’d say.

---

• Bharrat Jagdeo, Guyanese, Monday’s elections, PPP measure, private facilities, Vice President

---