Dear Editor,
I’ve been observing with no great surprise the aftermath of the embarrassing Manickchand attack on now former US Ambassador Brent Hardt. I met Ambassa-dor Hardt a few times and I found him to be professional, pleasant and cordial. After winning the Guyana Prize last year, at the ceremony I presented him with gratis copies of my books and before the week was out I received a telephone call asking for my address, subsequent to which I was delivered via an embassy driver a handwritten note of appreciation and a medal from his office. I read an article once at the website of The Politic, the Yale Undergraduate Journal of Politics, featuring the Mr Hardt as a Yale Alumnus, a decorated career diplomat versed in five languages who had hitherto attracted no controversy in his postings.
For someone of that sort of pedigree, I do not envy the man’s tenure in Guyana. Not only has it been marked by the PPP’s vicious attacks on him, but at one point they extended – via the pro-PPP cowardly online slander network – to a member of his family. The salvo fired against him by the government’s Minister of Education, acting in the capacity of Foreign Affairs Minister was therefore not a spontaneous reactionary event but a result of the policy of abuse that Freedom House has in place for those saying anything contrary to its vested interests.
Of course, as has been exposed by multiple commentators, the rationale given in the speech about being wary of US historical interventionism in Guyana is completely hollow. The PPP would have us believe that the same Cold War-context interventions of the 1950s and ’60s, which somehow did not matter in 1992 when the PPP courted the intervention of the USAID-funded Carter Center, somehow suddenly matter in 2014 when they are the ones in power. And, if there were ever an act of symbolic of reconciliation of the PPP and the United States it was that Cheddi Jagan died not in Guyana or Russia or China or Cuba but in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington DC, ie, in a US government military facility in the American capital, the seat of its political power; and he was flown there by the US Army. Moreover, the PPP cannot seriously consider itself the guardian of Guyana’s patrimony when secret and parasitic deals are being made with Chinese state companies while the untested Ambassador Dr David Dabydeen sits down in Beijing spending his time. The same PPP that speaks about the ‘impropriety’ of the Ambassador’s reminding the President of the constitutional obligation featured the now disgraced former governor of the Brazilian state of Roraima, Jose de Anchieta Junior, sharing the campaign platform with Donald Ramotar and Bharrat Jagdeo, and endorsing the PPP.
Samuel Johnson said that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, but with even that façade ripped apart, always shameless in her pronouncements, the dinosaur that is Gail Teixeira has now resorted to the supposedly safe and self-righteous havens of gender and ethnic politicking.
Suddenly, Priya Manickchand isn’t simply an ignorant embarrassment to Guyanese everywhere (and I personally have been asked by respected colleagues from across the region what on earth was going in with our government) but she is a marginalized Indian woman exposed to racism and sexism, while acting in defence of her country. This from a governing party that is known for its racism, as exposed most recently by the Freddie Kissoon libel trial that the plaintiff himself, Mr Jagdeo, is now running from because of the political capital the evidence being presented has cost the party; and this from a party one of whose functionaries recently resigned in the midst of allegations linked to predatory behaviour. I have said it before and I will repeat it here. The PPP has been shown its mortality as a political hegemony, both in electoral as well as systemic terms. And it is afraid. The glitz is gone and what we are exposed to is its rampant incompetence and corruption, but it continues to defend this incompetence and corruption with an increasingly ferocious impunity – it has become, to coopt Dr Luncheon’s own adjective, feral.
This is no longer about economic policy or political ideology or patriotism. This is about holding on as long as possible to power.
In the wake of Minister Manickchand’s comments, I’ve seen a great many people express surprise at the depths to which the PPP is willing to go to defend itself. Most of these people however have been silent in the wake of the incrementally increasing indecency that has led us to this place, and I can say with all confidence that, as Freedom House continues to crumble, such utterances will increase exponentially, particularly since it has run out of all plausible excuses for its refusal to hold local government elections. It is up to us, the citizens of Guyana to roundly condemn the shamelessness, whether by booing them in person or censuring them on social media commentary or in letters to the editor. A basic intellectual and moral non-cooperation with the idiocy and incompetence coming from the seats of corrupt government is a powerful tool and it is one we need to use more frequently.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Albert Johnson
