Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon yesterday confirmed that he wanted to be president of the country back in 1997.
“I did. Yes that is true…but there is much speculation but it remains in the realm of high speculation today in 2015,” Luncheon said when asked by Stabroek News if he had indeed aspired to be leader of the country in 1997.
It was former PPP stalwart Ralph Ramkarran, in his column in the Sunday Stabroek this week that revealed Luncheon’s ambitions.
Luncheon however stated that the ambition to be President of the country was also held by Ramkarran and he too was a PPP candidate in 2011 but lost to now President Donald Ramotar.
“Ralph too…We always had multiple candidates. It’s nothing new, in 2011 we had five candidates including Ralph himself,” Luncheon stated.
He said that the choice for president was a decision made by the Central Committee of the party and as such their decision was final. “The decision of the central committee is binding on all party members,” Luncheon explained.
Ramkarran recalled that in 1991, having failed to structure an electoral alliance with the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy and later with the WPA, the late former President Dr Cheddi Jagan offered to sacrifice the top spot to Luncheon to satisfy demands by Guyanese Action for Reform and Democracy (GUARD) that he was not a suitable presidential candidate. GUARD rejected the offer. Eventually, in an alliance with civil society members, Cheddi Jagan became presidential candidate and GUARD’s leader, Sam Hinds, the prime ministerial candidate, Ramkarran wrote.
He said that with the passing of Dr Jagan in 1997, the effort to compromise in the interest of national unity, or internally in the interests of party unity, ended. In 1997, Ramkarran said that Luncheon rejected several independent private initiatives suggesting a Ramkarran-Luncheon ticket for the elections of that year.
He offered to support instead a Luncheon-Ramkarran ticket, Ramkarran wrote while adding that he learnt of these initiatives after they were made and rejected.
“After his response gained no traction, he became one of the most ardent and articulate spokespersons for a Janet Jagan-Sam Hinds ticket instead of the Ramkarran-Hinds ticket, proposed by Mrs. Jagan herself, who pointed out the several reasons why she disqualified herself, and why the ticket she proposed was the most suitable,” Ramkarran, a former Speaker of the National Assembly, wrote.
However, Ramkarran said, Mrs. Jagan succumbed to “disingenuous and shortsighted blandishments” and the rest is history.
According to the former Speaker, Luncheon’s progressive instincts relating to Guyana’s ethnic and political dilemmas, “unknown because he had to suppress them after 1997 in the new dispensations,” would have flourished as prime minister and later as president. “He would have encouraged the PPP towards significant measures enhancing national unity.
But after 1997 he was entrapped in a party, rocked by public unrest, which soon after lost its ideological moorings,” Ramkarran asserted.
