Dear Editor,
In historical terms, we have to concede that the PPP government is virtually on death row. The changing demography ensures that, come next elections, the party may fall irretrievably below the line that today ensures it a plurality and the presidency. Which is to say that, as of today, the party has to begin, in its mind, imagining what would be inscribed as its epitaph – how it would be characterised, and what its own “28 years” would be remembered for; what it did with the legacy it inherited from Dr Cheddi Jagan and the moralistic nationalists of the first hour; what it leaves, as memories and inheritance, to its scattered adherents.
Let us therefore consider that we are seeing a party in its death throes, thrashing about in the final agony of its own toxic irrelevance. Raging against the dying of the sour light that now hangs about it like a cloud.
There would be more dignified ways of marking this phase of the government than the firing of Frederick Kissoon. For, as wrote Martin Carter, the poet of the first hour
… life is the question asking
what is the way to die
Which lines I have always interpreted to mean ‘How did one live and in what moral and spiritual condition did one exit life.‘ True of a person as of a party and of a polity.
It is this that must interpellate the ruling party of this hour, and all of us, as the historical precedent strikes our minds. The PNC, in its own “28 years” never, in my recollec-tion, bothered to fire many of the known PPP members and militants embedded in the university and civil service. One of them, Mr Jagdeo, would later rise in the opposition. Would later be heard ungratefully and mendaciously thundering about needing a party card to find or to keep work. Would later set the tone for a hysterically intolerant and rancorous regime, high on whose list of crimes is the abasement of the media under its control and the infliction of punishment on its critics in the press. The “carrion crows” and “vultures,” as Mr Jagdeo labelled those critics, augured no good for his party. He correctly read the signs. The PPP, as we know it, is soon dead. A new PPP, we are sustained by the hope, is needed. Or the lessons of the last elections are lost on those blind at its helm headed for the pit of oblivion.
The party, like its predecessor in government, seems insensitive to the flux of sympathy for the victim that news of this sort will cause. Many identified with Walter Rodney if for no other reason than the fact he had been denied a job at the university. But a lot of the leadership of the WPA (including Clive Thomas and Omowale and Rupert Roopnaraine) worked at UG for years under Burnham and/or Hoyte. So did people with known PPP sympathies. But the governing party of the day seems to be doing its best to prove Mr Kissoon right. In many ways they are worse than what they replaced.
Mr Kissoon is before the courts in a libel suit brought by Mr Jagdeo after a vituperative campaign by the lecturer in Kaieteur News. Much of what the columnist contends, coincides with observations shared by many PPP faithful, apparently disappointed at their party’s performance in many areas and demotivated to the point that they abstained from participating in the past elections. The arena of the courts, in which the libel case was hastily called (by known standards) eventually became the hanging grounds on which was tried and destroyed some of the reputation of the PPP, and many of the self-righteous illusions, harboured by the party and possibly some of its followers, concerning their custodianship of the Jagan legacy.
And what is noteworthy in all of this, is the incontestable fact that the PPP, cackling on through the centuries about the PNC, said much worse of that party than what Mr Kissoon said about it.
In terms of the Kissoon issue. There has been overkill on both sides. Except that the latest development would be interpreted by many to suggest that it was Mr Kissoon who was right about the real nature of the ruling party. So, the wheel having turned from the PNC days, the current governing party exposes its real values in terms of freedom of the press. The reactions to crticism we saw – withdrawal of advertisements, support of a feeble alternative press, a sycophantic ‘national newspaper‘ that exists in the public space as a sort of standing embarrassment, the covering up of scandal, emission of lies and ignorance, the granting of radio licences to the favoured ‘safe‘…
The conflict has now moved into another sphere – the firing, where it could be Mr Kissoon’s turn to take to the courts.
In all this there is a constant. It is the discomfort we feel as we witness the continuing degradation of our political culture. We would have preferred to leave, from this hour, souvenirs of a struggle as noble as we picture was the struggle of the nationalist generation of the fifties. But what we are living is the quality of the dregs of one sort. An orientation to corruption and a contempt that finally renders some of our politics by no means beneficial to either class or race, but merely representative of a dangerous if mindless mediocrity, soiling us all. And leaving, as it is mopped off the stage, only the persistent stain and stench of its disgraceful passage.
But let us live in the hope and the encouragement of the good example of many of our young people, no, people of all generations, that hold fast to the higher standards of which we are convinced we are capable. Let us take comfort in the fact that the PPP is constantly being judged. And not only by its opponents, but by its supporters as well. The PPP as we know it, is soon dead. Let us hope that a new PPP leaps from its ash to redeem it.
Mr Ramotar, who had worked in the media for many years, understands we are sure, and may not be complicit, but can and will correct a mistake from which his government gains nothing but a perverse satisfaction. It is simple horrendous PR.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
