OPINION: Exploiting Cheddi Jagan’s good name

Last Updated on Thursday, 14 March 2024, 15:48 by Denis Chabrol

By Dr Randy Persaud, Professor Emeritus

There is an annual ritual in this country. Every March, die hard anti-PPP operatives wake up from a yearlong slumber of their conscience to pronounce Dr Cheddi Jagan as the greatest man who ever lived in this country. By the end of March, these political hacks from the PNCR led APNU+AFC, including those who take cover under the label civil society, abandon Cheddi, and commence their campaign of vilification against the PPP, Cheddi included.

The latest installment of this annual deposit of balderdash goes as far as to construct Cheddi as a “patron saint,” only to then turn around to exploit the same big-up of the great man against the party he founded. The latest perpetrator, one Eric Moseley (MS), having set up Cheddi Jagan as an exemplar of good governance, unleashes his true intention via a litany of innuendos on the treatment of teachers, public servants, and oil revenues. The man provides no serious data, no history, no context, and of course, no review of the categorical obstructionism of the PNCR led APNU+AFC.

Then there is Jamil Changlee, one who is simply content to offer vacuous political cocktails such as “We must continue to embrace the Unions that have strengthened us over the years and we must respect our workers” (KN, 3/13/24). Is Changlee aware that PNC unions have also wreaked havoc in this country going all the way back to the 1960s. Is he aware that the teacher’s union has only minimal support across the teaching profession? Is he aware that senior teachers are among the most highly paid staff in Guyana? Is he aware that teacher trainees’ salaries moved from $12,000 to $104,000 under the Mohamed Irfaan Ali administration? Is he aware of the thousands of dollars (US currency) in scholarships offered to any teacher who wants a GOAL scholarship?

Then there is the ubiquitous pontiff GHK Lall, a man who is smitten by Granger, the same Granger who presided over those five months of electoral agony in 2020. The same Granger who served with glamor under the PNC dictatorship. The same Brigadier General who perhaps found his element in strategizing the militarization of every institution under the PNC dictatorship. At some point Granger’s self-appointed defender, and self-anointed protégé, GHK Lall, must answer if the Brigadier General was following orders from Burnham and Green (the Elder) or was himself the one with the mandrel. Homo faber; man the maker.

Less you think this is harsh stuff against Mr. Granger, you should just think of the words protégé, GHK Lall has used against President Ali. I refuse to repeat them here because they are the words that come for a new kind of APNU-AFC spiritual bitterness. The thing they are most bitter about is that they were stopped dead in their tracks in attempts to steal the elections of 2020.

The list of those who love Cheddi Jagan in the month of March, only to turn against him for the rest of the year, is long and filled with the very people who applaud authoritarianism, rigged elections, race-baiting, economic incompetence, and a mental dependency on the state as their ATM. These are the same folks who rig their own elections, destroy their own financial institutions, and whose main area of expertise is to cultivate antagonism, and then run to that thing called the “international community” for protection against forces that are mere figments of their imagination.

Dr Randy Persaud is Advisor, Office of the President.