Dear Editor,
In his column last Sunday (‘The PPP has lost its way’, SN, July 5), Mr Ralph Ramkarran made the following statement: “The PPP has made, arguably, the most egregious blunder in its entire history by failing to implement Cheddi Jagan’s ‘shared governance’ or ‘winner does not take all’ policies in political conditions in 2011, where it could have been easily sold to its supporters. The PPP would have had to make fundamental concessions and share power in circumstances of equality where it would not ‘dominate or be dominated’ ‒ a policy also advocated by Jagan.”
I am deeply committed to a revisionist methodology to look at the politics of Forbes Burnham and Dr Cheddi Jagan with the intention of unearthing the negatives and positives in the long careers of both men. In this pursuit, I have been more tempted to research the myths in Jagan’s career because I feel these falsities have been passed on to several generations as truths
I honestly believe that Guyana’s historiography cries out for a correction to the many fictions that have been turned into positives in the politics of Cheddi Jagan. It is for this reason, I have attempted to confront these falsehoods for several years now. Too many virtuous things have been attributed to Cheddi Jagan that were absolutely baseless.
My research findings are that Cheddi Jagan was not the nationalist, power-sharing believer, multi-racial democrat and good man that people have made him out to be. Mr Ramkarran could be forgiven for his statement (quoted above) because of his personal relationship with Dr Jagan over a long period. An objective and independent-minded historian would not have written those words because there is nothing in history and the career of Dr Jagan to support them.
In October 1992 Dr Jagan became President. He died in March 1997. If we leave out the weeks he was hospitalized, he ruled for four years. In that four year stewardship, Dr Cheddi Jagan was openly exclusive rather than inclusive in his approach to power. I believe there were three characteristics in Jagan’s presidency that Mr Hoyte reacted emotionally to, and consequently became implacably opposed to the continuation of the PPP in power.
One was President Jagan’s relentless crusade against public service personnel whom Dr Jagan was not prepared to accept because he deemed them PNC people. Secondly, there was the incestuous politics of the PPP that Mr Hoyte found shocking because when he, Hoyte, was President, he sought not to saturate the public sector with PNC choices. Thirdly, there is the ethnically driven policies of the PPP. If Mr Hoyte had reason to confront Jagan over his ‘excluding’ approach to power, it was the Working People’s Alliance which bore the brunt of Jagan’s narrow approach to power.
The WPA was virtually shut out from even minor roles in Dr Jagan’s administration. The big quarrel between Dr Jagan and the WPA came about with Dr Jagan’s offer to Clive Thomas to be a minister. The WPA rejected this because it involved direct contact with Thomas rather than being done within the framework of party to party cooperation. The WPA wrote to Jagan and advised that he, Jagan, could not select which WPA leader he wanted to work with. That marked the abrupt and decisive end of the WPA’s relations with the PPP.
Donald Rodney, Walter Rodney’s brother, told me he had to migrate because as a quantity surveyor he received no contracts from the PPP government after 1992. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Dr Jagan, Mrs Jagan and the entire PPP leadership became very hostile to the WPA to the point where the PPP saw the WPA as its post-1992 enemy. Fazal Khan, the late husband of Ms Gail Teixeira told me he heard Mrs Jagan say about the WPA, “They want power through the backdoor.”
History should not forgive Cheddi Jagan for what he did to the WPA. Dr Jagan’s exclusion of the WPA was typical of the man. Dr Jagan was never interested in power-sharing, but he pontificated a lot about it when in opposition. I suspect this was what guided Mr Ramkarran to write what he wrote last Sunday.
I end with another example. It comes from a Guyanese icon, Yesu Persaud. Mr Persaud told me and I believe he has repeated it, that in 1993, as head of the Private Sector Commission, President Jagan requested from him a list of persons whose service the government could use.
Mr Persaud said Jagan was careful to exclude names on the list of people who had political relationships outside the PPP. Twice on his television programme, ‘Eye on the Issues,’ Mr Persaud told his viewers that when he, Persaud, at the home of Dr Motilall in front of a group of businessmen raised the issue of stripping the presidency of its enormous powers, Dr Jagan said, “Can you see me behaving like a dictator?” That was Jagan’s way of accepting the 1980 constitution. The infamous story of Dr Jagan is yet to be told.
Yours faithfully,
Frederick Kissoon
