Dear Editor,
I just finished watching a press conference held by opposition leader, Bharrat Jagdeo, one that was as mesmerizing as it was macabre. Mesmerizing in how fluidly he painted a narrative of himself as some magnanimous reformer out to transform Guyana’s political environment, as opposed to the primary architect of this present era of dysfunctional politics. And macabre in how much of this narrative he was able to spin without contradiction in a room full of media people.
The first spin of course was his casual mention of the creation of 50,000 jobs over five years of the PPP next coming into power. This was a direct contradiction of his presidential candidate’s assertion only days ago that there would be 50,000 jobs created in the first year, not the first term of the PPP in government.
This was followed up by a number of strange and absurdly righteous assertions by Mr. Jagdeo. He, for example, claimed that there was a rise in racist content in the Guyana Chronicle and that that sort of thing would not happen under a PPP government. Now, I have gone on record as criticizing the recent tone of coverage in the state paper, particularly in its reporting on politics and as a former member of the board of GNNL, I see it as a dangerous reversal of every progressive initiative put in place to improve the content of the state paper. That said this is something that Mr. Jagdeo would not be unfamiliar with since it is precisely that sort of coverage that premised my original resignation from Chronicle in 2006 in the lead up to that year’s elections. By the time 2015 came around, the Chronicle was the subject of multiple condemnations, including from the Guyana Bar Association, for its blatantly racist content on multiple occasions. Neither Mr. Jagdeo nor Mr. Ramotar, his anointed successor, once uttered a word of condemnation and the only censure, the apparent removal of the author of one of those editorials, Parvati Persaud-Edwards, was a façade.
Mr. Jagdeo condemned the Prime Minister’s use of “four planes” to take persons into Lethem last week, claiming that it was an abuse of state resources. It is my understanding that the occasion was the launch of the Year of Indigenous Languages, a landmark global cultural event and that those who flew in were relevant government agency staffers and indigenous language speakers from around the country. Again, I’ve taken this administration to task on its sloth on critical cultural policy initiatives but this was a progressive move that warranted the exact sort of government support that was demonstrated. That said, this condemnation of the alleged abuse of state resources is coming from the same Bharrat Jagdeo who took the abuse of state resource to a fevered and indecent pitch whether it was the massive deployment of Guysuco trucks to attend PPP political rallies, or to the fetishistic spectacle of self-worship that was his outgoing Appreciation Ceremony.
Of recent, he has continuously gotten away as well with his indecent pivoting away from the failures of his administration on Guysuco, including his disastrous Skeldon investment and further disastrous management thereof, and allowed to speak of the industry as if it or its very real problems did not exist prior to 2015. And then there was his laughable claim of a quiet cabal fleecing the country, something he – the patron saint of clientelism – said with a straight face and which went unchallenged by the media.
All that taken into account, there are two points of pivot that I have noticed him using over the past year to discount two very important aspects of his presidency, both of which go beyond the pale of insidious spin as evidenced in the above. The first has to do with his calling into question the list of 400 persons reportedly killed extra-judicially under his tenure, one that I believe was originally composed as simply that, a list of extra-judicial killings, but one that persons have incorrectly referred to as “400 black men”. At his press conference, Jagdeo latched on to that misnomer to call into question the validity of the entire list since, in his estimation, it contained about 70 plus East Indian names, policemen who were killed, and the victims of the Lusignan and Bartica massacres. With this attempted intellectual sleight of hand, not only does he discount those covered in the list that don’t fall into the categories he cited, but the manner of their deaths and the deaths of some people who fall into those very same categories. There is no spin to be placed on the reign of terror that occurred under Mr. Jagdeo’s regime, whether it was carried out by criminals acting on their own behalf, criminals acting with political backing, criminals acting in collaboration with the state, or officers of the state engaged in the extra-judicial execution of citizens of Guyana who were not afforded due process.
The other indecent pivot undertaken by Mr. Jagdeo has to do with his terms of reference for engaging in a debate with public commentators like Dr. David Hinds who have perpetually taken him to task for his racially discriminatory policies as president. Jagdeo’s frame of reference isn’t the objective measurement of Afro-Guyanese versus Indo-Guyanese advancement or placement in his practice of government, nor is it the assessment of the content of the very state media he now condemns. This is not a framework of assessment he can argue against, as evidenced from the disclosures coming out of the libel trial he brought against Freddie Kissoon for accusing him of racist policy, as well as the very content of the state media under his tenure. What Mr. Jagdeo wants to measure is the economic progress of Afro-Guyanese in a period when there was a general economic downturn that affected all Guyanese versus the economic progress of Afro-Guyanese in a period when economic benefits should have been accruing equally to all Guyanese but during which they were skewed as a direct result of the policies of Mr. Jagdeo. This is the sort of pathetic sophistry that he can get away with only so far as no one challenges him on it.
Less than a week after the internal election of a candidate, Irfaan Ali, who has an uphill battle to climb to not only wash off the stain of personal scandal, as well as the perception that he is not so much Jagdeo’s protégé as he is his puppet, the former president continues to act as if he is the de facto future president with a fictional persona that in no way represents nor resembles his actual indecent practice of governance. If Mr. Ali wishes to avoid the descent into irrelevance that his predecessor Donald Ramotar suffered both as president and former presidential candidate, he would do well to relegate Jagdeo to a background supporting role at best.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
