Great societies grow out of the sacrifices of visionary leaders who stand up to fight against historical injustice.
Today, a man harbours the ambition in his heart to join this elite group of outstanding, self-sacrificing leaders.
For these leaders inspire Khemraj Ramjattan, presidential candidate for the Alliance For Change party.
This desire, this passion to end injustice drives him to make personal sacrifices in the cause of a greater good.
As lawyer and politician, his quest is for a just Guyanese socio-political system, a country where injustice gives way to fairness, justice and dignity of the individual.
The names of visionaries like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and other leaders who fought against historical injustice flow out of his mouth with ease. He has studied their works and thought long and hard about their accomplishments. They inspire in him the zeal and zest to transform Guyana’s ethnic problem, which he sees as the biggest historical injustice that cripples the country’s development.
Ramjattan sat down with Guyana Review for an exclusive interview in Ontario, Canada on February 20 last, and he talked about his deep desire to re-make the political history of his country.
He embraces leader of the party, Raphael Trotman, as his “brother”, asserting that the Trotman-Ramjattan team came together to heal the “schism that the Burnham-Jagan split caused”.
Forbes Burnham and Dr Cheddi Jagan had formed the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) on New Years day in 1950, to fight against British colonial rule. But in 1957, Burnham split and formed the People’s National Congress. This caused a division along ethnic lines in voting patterns, with Afro-descended Guyanese voting for the Burnham party, while Indo-descended Guyanese gravitated to the Jagan party. This voting pattern became entrenched, and now, five decades later, Ramjattan says he is committed to repairing the breach.
This commitment cost him his political position within the PPP, where he unsuccessfully challenged that party’s structure and internal system, going up against powerful figures.
As a youth he even challenged and defied then party leader Dr Cheddi Jagan and party secretary Janet Janet to reform the Constitution of the youth arm of the party.
Could Ramjattan ever become Guyana’s president?
He said the presidency comes second in his ambition to seeing the country “achieve healing and reconciliation”. If the two main political parties join forces in a coalition government, he and his own party would provide Parliamentary opposition, and he would be happy that the political ethnic strife would be over.
“I would be happy with whatever the people of this country choose. If in the next election I am not even elected to Parliament or I lose through the ballot box, then so be it. I would gladly resign and bow to the will of the people. But my goal is to heal this deep political division that has existed for so long, along ethnic lines.”
Political action for him leads to the singular result of ethnic healing. “That’s my goal. That’s what I see as necessary for the country to move forward, for the people to be satisfied with their government, unlike what’s going on now, where few people are satisfied with government. Under the PNC we had 28 years when half the country was dissatisfied with Government. Now for the past 18 years we have the other half dissatisfied. I want to bring about a change so that we have a Government that causes people, everyone, to be satisfied,” he said.
Writing his views in the Stabroek News got Ramjattan threatened with expulsion from the People’s Progressive Party/Civic.
“Bharrat Jagdeo threatened to expel me from the Party because I wrote in the Stabroek News about my views,” Ramjattan said.
He made a choice to refuse to shut up, and sacrificed his party position to be able to speak his mind.
As a man who fights for “commerce with conscience” and “politics with principles” in this society, he feels a strong obligation to stand his ground. That got him into enormous trouble in the PPP.
Ramjattan pays keen attention. He focuses all his energies ton someone talking to him. He is alert and intensely interested when in a conversation, even with a fan asking for an autograph.
Tall and bespectacled, he stands upright with squared shoulders, confident, dressed comfortably in his signature dark-coloured lawyer’s suit.
He is accustomed to speaking in public, and is articulate.
Raphael Trotman impresses him as a man of integrity. “Trotman asked the leader of the PNCR, Mr Robert Corbin, to apologize to the nation for decades of rigged elections. Mr Corbin refused. And Trotman was ejected from the party. I faced the same thing. Both Jagdeo and Corbin are unprincipled. We need politics with principles, and like Gandhi said, we need commerce with conscience. Instead, we have the PPP/C that is now made up of an oligarchic cabal…,” Ramjattan said.
He said when he fought with the party for free and fair elections, won in 1992, he wanted to fulfil the promises made.
“The corruption now is so blatant. You have a guy who never built a road anywhere receiving a US$15 million contract to build a road in the jungle. That’s not what I fought for in 1992. I fought for a new dawn. Now power lies in the hands of the party leader. Jagdeo is arrogant, he cusses you down Mahaica style.”
He said the party now in power promised the nation that it would change the “Burnham constitution”, and “that was never done”.
He said “I have a message of harmony and reconciliation. My party wants a fair tax system. We will reduce the VAT so the average person could live with more income. We want fairness. A democracy is more than free and fair elections. It’s an evolving process, an unfinished journey. We, as a nation, have a mindset that fosters a voting pattern that doesn’t work. We have to change that. The ethnic voting pattern is what minimizes growth.”
Ramjattan turned 50-years-old on October 12, 2010. He feels he has matured to assume a role as a senior statesman in the country.
He formed the AFC with Trotman and a team of concerned citizens in 2005, and immediately the party jumped into the fray of national elections in 2006, winning five seats in Parliament.
He said the ideal leadership team would be him and Trotman. “I want Trotman as the Prime Ministerial candidate of the party. I am happy with Sheila Holder. Trotman thinks a woman should be one of the leaders, and I am fine with that. But the ideal team to heal Guyana and bring reconciliation to the nation is the Trotman-Ramjattan team.”
He believes the party should have a rotation system for the presidency, with him and Trotman switching places mid-term.
This system is unlike the one tried by the Working People’s Alliance, which, he said, does not have a rotation leadership system, but rather, a “collective leadership system. Ours is very different, and I am confident it is the best way forward.”
He feels that he and Trotman have “demonstrated our leadership ethics. We are different leaders than the others, because we believe in moral and ethical values.”
Trotman lives as a man of faith, attending church regularly, and also Holder is a “serious Christian” Ramjattan said. He said that he is also a man of faith, believing that “there is a spiritual power over us who wants us to do good things in society, and we are agents in bringing about that good.”
He said as a Hindu he visits mandirs and encourages the leaders to teach their people sound moral and ethical values, and that, unlike many of the leaders in government now, he is not an atheist.
Ramjattan denies that his party receives funding from narco-financiers, as alleged in the state media.
“That is all crap. The party is doing okay, but we seek our funds from ordinary folks who are donors. We have to raise lots more money.” He had just wrapped up a North American fund-raising tour for the party, when he granted this interview.
“Our message is being well received in Guyana and from the Diaspora. It’s a lot of crap that the AFC gets narco-dollars,” he reiterated.
So what makes the Ramjattan-Trotman team different?
“For me, I grew up in a family structure in Berbice with certain values – respect for fairness, reason and justice. My whole life and philosophy is for fairness and justice. In my law training and in my upbringing, I have developed a deep respect for the fearless quest for justice,” Ramjattan said.
Married with two sons – 18-year old Divesh and 20-year old Vikash, both studying at the University of Guyana – Ramjattan feels he has a mandate to transform the country.
Even within the PPP/C, “I fought for the party to keep its promise for constitutional change, and got expelled for it.”
Why doesn’t the PPP/C want that constitutional change now? “Because we have a leader now who is a Burnham without the intellectual sophistication. The dictatorial constitution suits his method of leading the country,” he said.
He said he “helped” Jagdeo achieve the position of president of Guyana, and so “I resent him for being Machiavellian. I had told him I did not want a position in government, that I would serve in whatever capacity I was needed. But the entire government situation changed under Jagdeo.”
So what would he do differently?
He said he has studied the political reforms in Malaysia and Singapore that transformed those societies, and he would incorporate similar strategies in Guyana.
“First, our party would have a philosophy of healing and reconciliation. We will chart a new course. We would make sure there is a fairer tax system. We would drastically reduce interest rates, especially for mortgages. We would encourage entrepreneurship, and an education system that includes skills from the Diaspora to train a workforce to support those entrepreneurs,” he said.
Noting that the Singapore/Malaysia model has achieved miracles for those Asian nations, Ramjattan said he “does not have an ego”, and therefore would lead a government by “bringing in ideas from wherever they work. I would bring good ideas together. I don’t have answers, but there are many ideas we can see working, and we need to adopt those.”
And he is a man of knowledge. “I read a lot,” he says, displaying the current book he is reading, about President Barack Obama’s place as a black man in America.
If he is such a conscientious person, why does he represent narcotics accused in his law practice?
“Apart from the fact that as a lawyer I cannot refuse to represent anyone, at least to see that a fair trial is carried out, I actually only represent someone if I am convinced that person is innocent. If I know someone to be guilty, I would not defend that person. Although these cases are not coming my way anymore, I am very careful in cases of illegal drugs or rape that the one I am representing is innocent,” he said.
The CLICO debacle
In fact, he had strong words for government officials who, he said, he knows “ask for bribes from business people and investors. The lifestyles of these officials do not reflect the salary they receive. How are they able to afford such a lavish lifestyle?”
He said he has evidence that the CLICO insurance debacle happened because of gross corruption on an international scale that involved senior government functionaries.
He said that CLICO had a reserve fund of US$34 million sitting in a bank account in Georgetown. The company thought the money could be invested to earn interest on behalf of the policy holders. One opportunity for this came up with the Berbice Bridge project, which was attracting interest from the National Insurance Scheme and the New Building Society.
Ramjattan said that a Trinidad and Tobago figure worked with a Guyana government official to invest the CLICO funds in a community housing development project in Florida.
“The Florida investment collapsed and CLICO lost all that money,” Ramjattan said.
But, it could have been avoided, for Guyana’s laws were violated with the Florida investment. Ramjattan said that according to the laws, an insurance company cannot transfer more than 15 per cent of its reserve to invest overseas. However, “80 percent of the CLICO money was transferred out to a Bahamas account, and then to Florida, though there are mysteries in those transactions as well.”
He said “people are seeing this corruption happening. Even for the house of a very senior government leader, privates businesses donated the building material for the house. Isn’t that corruption? And the new housing scheme where the president and several ministers are building multi-million dollar homes is also riddled with corruption. I want to see the Freedom of Information Bill and the Broadcast Bill passed. That would help reform this corrupt system.”
Ramjattan said the country is not in a hopeless state. “We in the AFC offer that hope. I do believe that we’ll get it right and the country will pull through. I think one day we will achieve our potential. That’s my hope, and that’s the hope I offer the country. We cannot afford to allow hopelessness to prevail.”
He is promising “significant transformation” within the first 100 days in government should the AFC win the national elections.
Should the PPP/C win, he would prefer to see Ralph Ramkarran be the president out of that party.
Ramjattan has come a long way since he joined the PPP/C in 1990.
Prior to that he served as leader of the Progressive Youth Organization (PYO), the youth arm of the party. He ended his stint there with a revolutionary change that stamped him as a party radical. Defying Dr Cheddi and Janet Jagan, he deleted references to communism and Marxism-Leninism from the PYO constitution, and inserted the phrase “national democratic principles”. He won the support of the young members of the party to execute the radical shift.
This was the same time that Bharrat Jagdeo returned to Guyana from his studies in Moscow, Russia, and the communist world was collapsing under Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and peristroika reforms.
“I was inspired and fired up. I wanted those reforms and changes to come to Guyana, for the walls of division to be broken down,” he said.
In December of 1994, after satisfying the five-year requirement, both Jagdeo and Ramjattan were appointed to the Central Executive Committee of the party, a 35-member governing body.
However, very soon Jagdeo started progressing while Ramjattan was sidelined and ignored, and he was eventually disqualified from the Central Executive Committee, despite his five years service as PYO leader.
“I was advocating for democratic changes in the party, and that did not sit well with many of them, so I suffered for my advocacy,” he said.
But Ramjattan, who studied law at the University of Guyana and the University of the West Indies, wants history to “remember me as one who stood up fearlessly against bad governance, injustice and unfairness.” He remembers a Bar Association scholarship to England where he cemented his conviction that he should provide strong leadership for justice and fairness in society.
“My calling is to reform the political system so that harmony and reconciliation heal the society. I feel called to reform what happened in the 1950s with Burnham and Jagan. Raphael and I are the modern day Burnham and Jagan. This time, we want to transform the society for the greater good of everyone. We want to do this for the nation, both at home and in the Diaspora.”
