It must rank as one of the supreme ironies of this season that mere months after he headed a Commonwealth observer mission to the Sri Lankan General Elections, which by its very nature would have required evenhandedness and diplomatic skills, that former President Jagdeo has plunged headlong into the most virulent and partisan rabble-rousing on the political platform on behalf of himself and his party. The Commonwealth must surely have felt, no doubt like many others, that Mr Jagdeo having demitted office after 12 years as President would not find himself in the hurly-burly of an election campaign just three years later and would therefore be a suitable candidate for this mission. No one however calculated how intent Mr Jagdeo apparently was on protecting his own turf and ensuring that the opposition does not get into office.
As has been said before in these columns, it is rare that having served as President, Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces for 12 years that the holder of these offices would immediately throw himself back into the partisan fray as if it was his campaign and his tenure under examination. Indeed, it would have been expected that the previous holder of the office would have taken a backseat so as not to eclipse his successor. The only living ex-President aside from the serving PM, the country could have been served very well by the controversial Mr Jagdeo aspiring to the role of statesman. Alas, that was not to be. The resurgence of Mr Jagdeo has miniaturized the footprint of President Ramotar, the man whose record over the last three years should be carefully scrutinised and underlined the view that this isn’t an ordinary campaign but one where the inordinate interests of former President Jagdeo preside über alles.
This is a distinctly disturbing attribute of the PPP/C campaign which is no doubt the by-product of Mr Jagdeo’s behind-the-scenes involvement in the Ramotar administration. It has fed into the most astonishing slurs and race baiting on the campaign. The first being his gratuitous and vulgar use of a pejorative to describe Guyanese of Indian origin and later trying to defend its rendering as a positive contribution. There was no such patina, neither has Mr Jagdeo been able to establish the veracity of his drum-beating claim in the first place. Were it a properly functioning body, the former President’s remarks could easily have been referred to the Ethnic Relations Commission for creating racial disharmony. While Mr Jagdeo has thus far been unrepentant he must be continuously challenged by stakeholders and held to account until he resiles from this recklessness. The finding by the Media Monitoring Unit under GECOM that Mr Jagdeo’s statement on March 8 was racially divisive should serve as an added caution to him.
That however wasn’t the end of it. Mr Jagdeo then embarked on this expedition of denigrating military personnel. It was an abject and meretricious exhibition from a man who served as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces for 12 years. He told a PPP/C rally at Albion on April 19th “When they (APNU+AFC) link up with the military, as they have done, and come into your homes and start kicking the doors down and when they come after you, who is going to be there?” He added “They (APNU+AFC) are going to subvert the professionalism of the army and police because there will be no professional army or police. The entire executive is dominated by senior ex-policemen and ex-soldiers there can be no professionalism as was done in the past. So there are lots of things we have to be fearful about and lots of things we have to do in the future. I urge you when you go home think on these things”.
If there are proclivities in current or ex-military men of the tenor described by Mr Jagdeo then it logically follows that he was a gross failure in his tenure as Commander-in-Chief and had little positive impact. If, however, as is more likely the case, it was simply a strategem to rile up the PPP/C’s support base then Mr Jagdeo and the PPP/C have lost all sense and reasoning and are prepared to put a significant part of the population at odds with the military for the sole and selfish purpose of staying in power. The men and women of the armed forces who commit to defending this country with their lives must not be subjected to baseless accusations for pure political gain.
Mr Jagdeo then trained his opprobrium at former Chief of Staff Gary Best, who had served under him, simply because the latter had expressed his constitutionally enshrined preference for the opposition alliance. The former President had the gall to raise questions about the source of financing for Mr Best’s home in Pradoville 2 when Mr Jagdeo himself is at the top of the list of those who are yet to explain the source of their ostentatious lifestyle.
There must be some line of sanity and decency across which no politician in this campaign, particularly a former President who has benefited from the goodwill of the electorate in two elections, will veer. Unfortunately, Mr Jagdeo and those of his persuasion in the PPP/C have now done this on several occasions. His transgressions in this campaign will be carefully documented and will no doubt be the subject of reportage by the various observer missions and others. Democracy, the rule of law, stability and the aspiration to national unity must trump the machinations of former President Jagdeo and his colleagues in the PPP/C. In the remaining two weeks before the elections, the party and its leaders must campaign on the merits of their manifesto revealed on Saturday. They can by all means examine the shadowy and dark history of the PNC era but they must not conjure up metastatic memes that can rent national unity.
