October 27,2016
I observed in a column, recently, that I could understand the lack of shine on the 17-month leadership style of David Granger. The man is brand new to politics. Carl Greenidge was a UG lecturer when he became Finance Minister and after 1992 went out of Guyana for almost 20 years.David Patterson, Cathy Hughes, Joe Harmon, Dominic Gaskin, Volda Lawrence and the rest of the leadership of the Government have absolutely no experience in exercising state power even for short as a week.
Mistakes then are bound to be made that are perfectly understandable. The one personality that stands out is Moses Nagamootoo. This is a man of immense experience in politics. He was the de facto heir-apparent to Cheddi Jagan. He was a Minister in the Government twenty years ago. Surely, as Prime Minister he has the accumulated finesse to determine when the new government is doing something foolishly or walking on a pathway full of dirty mud.This columnist simply cannot understand why Moses Nagamootoo doesn’t use his fifty-year-old praxis to guide the government of which he is second in charge. Or could it be he is not interested or has been sidelined?
The mistakes the PPP made were obvious to any rational human being but they were not to the PPP. The PPP lost the majority in 2011 and lost office in 2015 because brutal mistakes that the party could not see were reenacted with increasing frequency.
What has the new government learnt from the impassible directions the PPP went into? You could be the most fanatical supporter of the Coalition, the mistakes they are making are too large to be ignored. The new regime of 2015 is repeating the errors of the PPP cabals and seems incapable of seeing it. We can trace these mistakes but space would not allow. What we can briefly allude to are a few that egregiously stand out.
There are constant complaints that Coalition leaders are into power and have forgotten where they came from. Little benefits to the working class they have taken away. Our pensioners who are in the have-not category have had their water and electricity subsidy removed. Financial benefits for poor people who do dialysis have been withdrawn. I hear that because of this there have been about fifty deaths.
I am checking into this story and have already interviewed relevant authorities who have confirmed the withdrawal. The cost of a large number of governmental services has been increased in most cases by over a thousand percent. Top APNU-AFC politicians are impatiently arrogant with the press and critics. The PPP installed non-performers as Ministers and didn’t care what criticism they received from the public. The APNU-AFC, especially the AFC, has done the exact thing. These are the very patterns of deportment that made citizen detest the PPP administration.
Now we have the transfer of Cabinet meetings to the army headquarters at Camp Ayanganna. Once this happened, the analyst has to make the comparison with the PPP regime. From 2002 to 2008, the PPP faced a security dilemma because of the connection between politics and narco-trafficking and the Buxton conspiracy.
During all this time, the PPP retained Cabinet meetings at the Office of the President. Where then was the security paranoia in those days? Then the PPP moved Cabinet meetings around the country. There was no paranoia about security; there were no security breaches at those sessions in Essequibo and Berbice. Why then does the Coalition need to shift Cabinet confabulations to army headquarters? Cabinet meets once a week. Couldn’t there have been alternative arrangement rather than play into the hands of the PPP? One of the attitudes of the PPP when it dominated Guyana was to stick with an unpopular policy simply because the APNU, AFC, the media and critics denounced it. The PPP knew the action was wrong, was not saleable but was inflexible because it wanted to defy the opposition. The APNU-AFC is doing the identical mischief. Moses Nagamootoo of all people must know that accusations of militarization are easily marketable in a majority of PPP’s constituencies. He has the experience to guide him.
My take is that the Coalition knew the Cabinet shift to Camp Ayanganna would not go down well, but it is content to dismiss criticism. It is content to go walk on the same muddy road the PPP traversed. Humans never learn from tragedies of history.
