President Bharrat Jagdeo’s verbal abuses of individuals at public forums degrade his office, the main opposition PNCR said yesterday, while adding that he appears “intoxicated” with the power of the presidency.
Reading yesterday from a prepared statement at the party’s weekly news conference, Chief Whip Lance Carberry said Jagdeo apparently finds it difficult to observe the standards of decorum expected of a head-of-state. “During what should have been a presidential address, to the opening ceremony, on Wednesday 1 September 2010, for Amerindian Heritage Month, President Jagdeo used the opportunity to ‘cuss out’ and verbally attack Dr. George Norton, the Chief of GOIP (Guyana Organisation of Indigenous Peoples) for the views he expressed during his earlier address to the ceremony,” Carberry noted. This, he added, caused the PNCR leader Robert Corbin to observe that “Mr. Jagdeo has no time, place or taste in terms of how he deals with these matters at public events and does degrade the office of president in the manner in which he behaves at public functions.”
Carberry also highlighted Jagdeo’s speech the same day to overseas scholarship graduates, noting that he should have delivered “a morally uplifting and inspirational address … for students who recently completed scholarships.” Instead, he charged, the president used the opportunity to take another swipe at the media, singling out “old people” who share their views. “What message was he conveying to these young people who are about to start to contribute to nation building? Is the president advocating that these young people should disrespect and disregard their elders? Such morally retrograde, short-sighted thinking and crudity is unbecoming of someone occupying the Office of President of Guyana,” he said.
Carberry added that attacks on elderly media contributors seems to be a “favourite pastime for the president,” who was also reported in May attacking several others as bitter old people to whom the future did not belong. He also noted Jagdeo’s remarks on Thursday directed towards accountant and attorney Christopher Ram at a meeting with Clico (Guyana) policyholders. “The president, in a most crude and petulant manner, abused Mr. Christopher Ram and refused to take any questions from him. Is this the behaviour that the Guyanese people expect of their president? If the president was not so ‘full of himself’ and, apparently, intoxicated by the power of the presidency, he may have come to recognise his own needs for mentoring and counselling, so that he could benefit from the guidance, wisdom and experience of the very persons against whom he has compulsively chosen to launch such venomous attacks,” he said.
