Dear Editor,
For the sake of basic decency and good sense, someone in the People’s Progressive Party needs to rein former President Bharrat Jagdeo in. As I expected, all the immediate post-Sri Lanka pretense at statesmanship evaporated as soon as he hit the campaign platform but even I didn’t expect him to have taken it this far. He’s gone from attacking sections of the ex-military for exercising their constitutional right to be involved in the decision-making process in this country, to insinuating that the current military will somehow be compromised, to specifically attacking a former Chief of Staff that he appointed, Gary Best, questioning Best’s ability to build a home next to his mansion compound.
Here’s the thing – I know Gary Best, and we’ve had some excellent conversations on politics and the state of the country. Another well-decorated army officer, currently serving and closer to my age, with whom I’ve also had some excellent conversations on politics and the state of the country is Bhageshwar Murli, husband of my friend, Minister of Education Priya Manickchand. I could easily see Murli, despite his Queen’s College education, eventually in charge of the armed forces of this country or in a leadership position in politics.
I’ve never been to Best’s house in Pradoville 2, but I was there at the house warming for Murli’s, right behind Jagdeo’s, and it was possibly the largest, most beautifully appointed house I’ve ever been to in Guyana. If young Mr. Murli were to be honourably discharged and chose to endorse the PPP, would Jagdeo send reporters after the fact to question his real estate dealings relative to his income?
Mr. Jagdeo’s increasingly desperate and rambling outbursts, while he seems immune to embarrassment himself, cannot be healthy for even the PPP, and are definitely not helpful to his party’s relationship with the military. One gets a sense that all the fear being injected into the PPP campaign has one direct source, Bharrat Jagdeo, and is more a manifestation of his personal individual angst than anything else. The increasingly shrill and irrational ‘warnings’ by Mr. Jagdeo doesn’t sound like a man confident of his party retaining government, nor even in the electorate’s capacity to judge his administration on the basis of its record.
The PPP as a private political party is free to succumb to the paranoid neurosis of its leader. It is indecent however to have that neurosis target one of our country’s core institutions, one that it has effectively had control over for almost quarter century. The men and women of our armed forces, most of whom would have come up under this administration, deserve far more than this irrational idiocy.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
