Dear Editor,
Babu John regularly features as the PPP’s ‘bottom house,’ with President Jagdeo voiding himself of his worst fears, illusions, and suspicions, as he opens up before the faithful.
His pre-elections pronouncements (as in 2006 and recently) are always, it seems, closely followed by politicians, the press and the general public. The President never disappoints. He sets a tone that one suspects will come to dominate PPP campaigning. In 2006 I am told, he warned the nation that certain folk would have access to guns if the PNC were allowed to get back in office. Inflammatory in the best of cases and particularly incendiary in our own.
This time he licks out at Brig (retd) Granger who, in the comic book conception of history we have come to associate with some in the PPP, he portrays with “blood on his hands.”
The whiplash he got was swift and must have been humiliating. Everyone from Kwayana to the PNC to the Brigadier himself expressed displeasure at his statement, with Granger putting particularly heavy manners on him. Granger hit back among other things, with “wife abusers” of which Jagdeo himself is supposed to be one, at the head of a regime Granger characterises as “immoral and dictatorial.” This is discourse that demonstrates what we all suspect, that the PPP needs to campaign and set the tone for campaigning at a more dignified level than that with which it is usually associated.
Dirty, bottom house rhetoric is not necessary. The ruling party can simply campaign on its record. It has achieved. Despite the assaults of all sorts to which it was subject. But it has also allowed itself to drift with the tide of corruption in a condition where the illegal drugs component of a parallel economy has tainted it. And where the efforts by its leaders to set themselves right in a Pradoville lifestyle contrasts so markedly with the tone and style of the politicians from the PNC years. It is why, we suspect, they so sedulously strain to mythify the PNC period, daubing it with a patina of lies and exaggerations that not even the Canadian Refugee Board bothers any more to believe. But perhaps it is all that the present clique of leaders have in their heads. Nothing more.
We bear in mind, also, that the President is not only campaigning against the PNC. But is occasionally lashing out at former friends and collaborators and relations gone bad. Navin Chandarpal was accused of being a useless rum shop habitué. As if Kellawan Lall (whose public profile is not far from that but whose pecadilloes I think may have been blown out of proportion) is more to the liking of the ruling clique. Sasenarine Singh is accused of being an incompetent self-promoter, with no explanation as to why he lasted so long on so many projects. We get the impression that, nesting close to the Big Man are all those drunken incompetents that Jagdeo will “out” when time comes. But with whom he now hangs out comfortably in the cockpit.
It would be better for the PPP to campaign on its record. If only for the reason that a dark cloud of scandals, uninvestigated and unventilated, hangs around it like so many flies drawn to fresh putrefaction. And it is a party of whom we expected better. A party that has, under Jagdeo and the many good members of his team, done well in some areas. It is a party of whom good may still come. But it has got to make a new start with new leadership. In my estimation Ralph Ramkarran, given a free hand, can save its members and supporters from the stagnant embarrassment in which they slowly steam.
Malcolm Harripual has warned that the PPP would be playing the ethnic card. It is discouraging to hear. But somehow, with the generally bad PR the party has been practising, we expect that old bad habits will come to the fore. It leads to a presentiment of problems in the future and that in the whirlwind to be reaped many of those now sowing the wind would have been comfortably settled elsewhere. Many of those not worthy of the Jagan legacy would be fondling their nest eggs as the Babu John faithful, caught in the storm, are swept to another level of bitter incomprehension.
The PNC in the meantime, seems better equipped than ever to take the country in hand. It has opted for a programme of national unity as its proposal for governance. It would be heartening to see, right now, from the ranks of the PPP, a different quality of leader and operative from the types Mr Jagdeo lately claims has infested its high places… the Neemakharams, the rum shop regulars, the ambitious incompetents… all headed for a comeuppance, we fear, after the final stop in Pradoville.
And we implore protection from those like the Mr TenPercents, the Mr TwentyPercents, the torturers, the drug traffickers, the visa sellers, the Mr Set-meself-right and his family and friends, the sycophants, those bitten by goat, those beaten by any other creature, those with the wrong DNA, those with the wrong everything. Including the morally handicapped of all sorts…
Berbice, the county that produced Sonny Ramphal, the Luckhoos, Chandisinghs and many other great Guyanese, needs to be remembered for something more than the rantings at Babu John. Who was Babu John anyway?
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
