Dear Editor,
When I said the numbers favoured the PPP in a purely racial voting contest, I knew that the opposition needed something potent to overturn the scales in its favour. Bharrat Jagdeo and President Donald Ramotar are that gift. Already, we have got the shameful Babu John repeat performance. But it is the vulgar, arrogant and ludicrous attempt to compare Cheddi Jagan’s lifestyle to his own that may bust this koker wide open. Just as in 2011, when Mr Jagdeo’s conveniently timed lawsuit against Freddie Kissoon backfired along with his atrocious gutter style of politicking, this opportunity cannot be missed. The opportunity is even bigger this time with what is an atrocious attack on the founder of the PPP and a patriot, freedom fighter and humble and modest son of the soil. I oppose many things about Cheddi Jagan but Mr Jagdeo is wrong on these fronts. This pathetic and deceitful comparison not only degrades and tarnishes Cheddi Jagan’s legacy, it creates an even bigger problem of projecting disturbing historical revisionism to the young within the PPP’s core constituency. The silence of the PPP hierarchy strongly suggests that the problem of the erasure of Cheddi Jagan from the identity of the PPP will certainly be magnified if it wins the election with this clan in control. This is not just a party matter, it is a national matter. Distorting his contributions is an act of national disgrace.
Sunday Stabroek’s editorial on the matter questioned whether the comment was arrogance, disconnect, deflection or carelessness. I see it as arrogance. It was not disconnection because there was blatant justification of his opulence. Nor was it deflection. Mr Jagdeo knew that the comment was going to set off a tectonic shift within the PPP. He did not care. This was brazen temerity, backed by an arrogant sense of invincibility, fuelled by the spinelessness from Ramotar to Rohee to the rest of the PPP’s Central Committee in dealing with Jagdeo. Since his ascendancy to the presidency, Mr Jagdeo has openly assaulted the Jagans’ legacy, as confirmed by his rebuke of private citizen, Janet Jagan. It must be that in his mind, he sees his legacy – a failed one at that – as defining the PPP of recent vintage. So, he is naturally, philosophically and conceptually emboldened.
The opposition cannot miss this opportunity. While the majority will vote race regardless of the abominations, failures, arrogance and venalities of the leadership of their race parties, there is a subset of the voting constituencies that will succumb to their moral core and do the right thing and will, in most cases, stay home. They will not support leaders who are incompetent, self-entitled and arrogant. They will not overlook gross wrongdoing, crushing venalities and mansions. That critical slice of African and Indian race voters existed under Burnham’s (post mid-1970s) and Corbin’s PNC and now under the post-Jagan PPP of Jagdeo and Ramotar. Then there is a segment of the race voting groups who will not abstain because of moral reasoning but purely because of their marginalization and exclusion from the gravy train. They are as self-entitled and avaricious as the leaders they detest but because those leaders have shut them out from the trough while giving the hog to a select few, they are determined to retaliate. In fact, this group tends to steadily grow in a society running on oligarchic and plutocratic excess, such as Guyana since Jagdeo’s presidency.
The irony is that the very leaders who created the monster of greed, are now being pilloried and vilified by this same monster afflicting their own ethnic constituents who feel they cannot get their share. The opposition needs these two segments of the PPP constituency to stay home or vote for the opposition. More bones will be thrown to the opposition. Can it seize them and convert them into votes and carve out an advantage?
In parting, Mr Jagdeo is the product of Janet Jagan’s ideological blindness and rigidity. Mr Jagdeo, the recently trained communist economist in a capitalist country, was Janet Jagan’s last attempt to leave her ideological imprint on the nation, even when it was evident that the only ideology emerging was the worst form of capitalist oligarchy and plutocracy. Yet Janet Jagan never used her considerable clout to fight the emerging scourge. At least, for all his flaws, Forbes Burnham tried to redeem himself by choosing a successor whom he knew would be many things he (Burnham) was not. Burnham looked for humanity and decency. Janet Jagan looked for ideology. Now that ideological choice is swinging a wrecking ball at the core ideology of the PPP and its founder leader. Oh, the irony.
Yours faithfully,
M Maxwell
