Moses has upped and left the PPP! After fifty years of service to the party he has rejoined forces with his brother, Khemraj Ramjattan in the AFC.
Moses is by far the biggest catch to have been landed by any party out of the current pre-elections traffic across the political floor. The PPP is trying to make light of the departure of Moses but the former Minister of Government, the man who saw himself as heir apparent to Cheddi Jagan says he intends to make them pay for what they did to him. “Cat eat deh dinner,” is what he declared at his first political outing with the AFC.
Moses has said and done more since then. He has trampled on the PPP’s hallowed political space on the Corentyne, bringing out the crowds and telling them that the country’s one-time socialist/communist party had, after the death of Dr. Jagan, become a corrupt cabal.
Quite what to make of Moses’s likely impact on the political landscape between now and November 28 is hard to say. What we do know is that Moses is no political schoolboy, that he has his supporters on the Corentyne and that Moses’ gain will be the PPP’s loss. The PPP can say what it likes; it surely cannot relish Moses running around in its key stronghold lampooning its presidential candidate and running down its near-former President.
The other day he went to the Parade Ground and called Donald Ramotar “a manufactured” candidate. Whatever does Moses mean by a manufactured candidate? Is Mr. Ramotar being likened to a can of processed peas or a tin of tuna or Tamarind balls? Can the Guyana Manufacturers Association say whether a presidential candidate, even if he hasn’t been saying too much on the campaign trail, can legitimately be categorized as “a manufactured candidate?”
Now Mr. Jagdeo says that Moses is simply being a ‘sour grapes’ politician, that what he is doing is carrying on because things have not gone his way and of course Mr. Jagdeo’s ways cannot be questioned……….he is, after all, the country’s chief tantrum-thrower.
On a more serious note our elections watchers have already reached for their calculators to try to determine just how many votes Moses and Khemraj can pinch from the Corentyne and how many more traditional PPP supporters they might persuade to stay at home. APNU, of course, will be doing a different kind of calculation along the lines of whether or not the PPP’s losses on the Corentyne arising out of the Moses factor will be greater or lesser than its gains among its own indifferent supporters who stayed away from the polls in 2006 for reasons some of which are best known to themselves and others of which are known to most of us. The rest of the political grasshoppers may not have been able to bring even their husbands and wives’ votes with them but as for Moses, he is quite a different matter.
