A Perspective
It took but a matter of days after President Donald Ramotar had made public the date for the holding of general elections for the country to realize that Bharrat Jagdeo would be the ruling Party’s engineer-in-chief in its bid for yet another term in office; and as the days went by it became clear that Mr. Jagdeo’s profile at the hustings would probably surpass that of the Party’s presidential candidate. For much of the time that is how it turned out.
Up until then Jagdeo has managed to keep a low enough public profile though rumours continued to fly thick and fast about the position of authority which he held within the ruling hierarchy. Accordingly, it would have made sense to the PPP to embrace Jagdeo as their political talisman for the elections campaign, a larger than life figure whose role was to seek to win back the support which the party lost at the 2011 general elections and which, in the final analysis, was the primary reason for the truncated 10th Parliament and President Ramotar’s forced decision to call early elections, bringing a premature end to his first term in office.
Analysts are now asserting that the posture of bombast and assertiveness which he has brought to his current role in the elections campaign vindicates the earlier assertions about his role as the power behind the throne. There is little doubt that for much of his presidency Mr. Jagdeo had energized the PPP faithful with his image as an assertive and energetic leader and an ‘ideas man.’ It was an image which the party had not seen in its leader since the halcyon days of Cheddi Jagan. Over time, the young Jagdeo came to be identified with a significant measure of economic progress and was able to fashion a high-profile on the regional stage arising primarily out of his advocacy of a coherent intra-regional strategy for food security with Guyana at the helm and beyond the region, for his carefully cultivated advocacy of a global environmental strategy that placed Guyana’s rainforest at its forefront.
Along the way, however, Mr. Jagdeo’s presidency had encountered some serious banana skins, not least some of the personal friends which he himself had cultivated and the linkages that had been made between his administration and widespread graft, nepotism, corruption. Later on, his own personal wealth was to become an issue.
Truth be told, while Mr. Jagdeo’s blemishes made him an easy target for his adversaries, they appeared to do little to diminish his popularity with the PPP faithful and it is this, evidently, that led to the ruling party inserting the former President into its campaign to win Donald Ramotar a second term in office. The hype and hoopla that had generated around Jagdeo was a critical part of the PPP’s elections campaign.
It is Mr. Jagdeo, primarily, who has been leading the campaign charge, making the devil-may-care, controversial utterances and attracting the attention of the mainstream media. By comparison, Mr. Ramotar has been sober, staid and, frankly, not nearly as much an eye-catching figure as his predecessor. This is not particularly surprising. Donald Ramotar’s tenure in office has been marked mostly by political stresses and strains associated with the problems of the tenth Parliament and the current President’s naturally more reserved disposition has meant that he has been unable to cast himself in the combative image of Bharrat Jagdeo.
Whether, however, the ruling party got it right in anointing Bharrat Jagdeo as the showroom of its elections campaign remains to be seen. Jagdeo may have been able to shake some of the cobwebs of indifference from party supporters who had become indifferent during the Ramotar years. On the other hand the image of the PPP/C administration suffered badly under his presidency on account of the defections from the Party by stalwarts like Ralph Ramkarran, Moses Nagamootoo and Khemraj Ramjattan who, as long-standing party stalwarts, cultivated support bases of their own. It is the likely changes to the electoral mathematics that attends the 2015 general elections that make the upcoming poll interesting.
The fact that Mr. Jagdeo has been presented as the ‘face’ of the PPP/C’s 2015 elections campaign is both a blessing and a curse. As has already been mentioned the whole idea of throwing him into the mix has to do with the party’s attempt to win back lost support. On the other hand there is something to be said for the remark made by Moses Nagamootoo at Whim on Sunday March 29 that Mr. Jagdeo – on account of his unbridled brashness, has had the effect of dwarfing Mr. Ramotar. Add to that his horrendous faux pas on the lifestyle of the Jagans compared with his own opulence and it quickly became clear that the former President had been granted license to function as a loose canon as part of the PPP/C’s campaign strategy.
