By GHK Lall- Guyanese are eyewitnesses to the slow reality of that grimmest of sayings from either Sophocles or Shakespeare: “Once a man, twice a child.” What some ancient political giants of Guyana put together and held together, through great storms and slim slivers of sunlight, now deteriorates before astonished observers. Before party faithful to local political opponents, from old foreign foes to present day overseas friends, Guyana’s People’s Progressive Party (PPP) decay and diminish with uncontrolled abandon.
The PPP is like a snowball barreling downhill to oblivion. Thanks to the handiworks, the terrible ambitions, of some of the more depraved successors to the Cheddi Jagan mantle, and a cast made up of mainly kleptocrats, the PPP is all of a giant shadow. After all the pretenses at substances and singular attributes, today the PPP is a hollowed-out shell, nothing but a doddering wreck. Indeed, evvel a man, twice a child fits seamlessly.
With what ought to have been the accumulated wisdoms of three score years plus fifteen (not ten), the PPP should be better than it has ever been. But which group, what entity, can succeed when it allowed itself to be riddled through and through with multiple cancers?
Leadership that goes down the wrong road with the wrong ideas is more than a recipe for disaster. It is a tragedy staring in their face, and in real-time. All the blustering of one man, the artful dodging of another, cannot put Humpty-Dumpty together again. When the working-class party of Cheddi Jagan, Brindley Benn, Ashton Chase, et al turns against the common people, then it can only be for the rich people of Guyana.
When one of the party’s most loyal stalwarts, Excellency Donald Ramotar, is shunted aside, shutdown from speaking his mind, then the barbarians run amok inside the PPP. When a man of the caliber of Mr. Ramotar’s own family can be attacked, because he dared to speak openly, not necessarily critically, then the PPP is not longer a party of the people, but one of plutocrats and kleptocrats. When PPP men and women fear to share their thoughts on public forums because the leadership would frown on any such participation, then Jagan and Ramotar and Rohee are all back in the political wilderness.
What is there to fear? How many wrongs have been committed that there is this desperate need to hide? It is a common expression in Guyana for conscientious Guyanese to state that Cheddi Jagan must be turning over in his grave. Though that has some relevance, it is more accurate to assert that his political descendants daily roast his memory on the slowest of slow fires. His PPP dies by a thousand cuts. What he stood for, they stamp upon and spit on any who is bold enough to challenge them. I cannot imagine that the likes of the crew that pilot the party’s ship would have found any resonance in the younger, cleaner, leaner PPP.
Today’s PPP has mutated in the ways of an old harlot (that’s how it has aged). Today’s PPP in the hands of those who push its buttons has degenerated into a piggish monstrosity. Blame that aspect on the party’s nearness and insatiable sampling of the rich fruits of Guyana. Clean is gone, dirty is in fashion, now standing culture. Think of this: the test of loyalty is how much is stolen from the people’s treasury. So, then, a noose is wrapped around the necks of the party’s apparatus at every level. The few honest have been cowed into near total silence. To speak out of turn is to sacrifice oneself.
Jagan endured those times when he had neither job nor a blind jill to give to his comrades. In flip-flops and bicycles, people like Ramotar were part of the fabric of the people. Today, the men in the PPP use, misuse, and abuse their own people for the worst outcomes. Yeah, a fish rots from the head. A snake may shed its scales, and it is still a serpent.
Men are so suffused with the arrogance of power (and oil money) that they have lost any connection to reasoned conversation, conscientious objection, fair contrarian expression. When their own are turned against, and the veterans are demonized, then more than one fateful Rubicon has been crossed. If the PPP brass can do that to its own comrades, then what is to be expected of how it views any Guyanese that stand outside of its high lairs and low dens?
Once a man, twice a child stands as a testimony of how some mysterious force working by its own clock reduces man to nothing. No matter the money. Regardless of the power. And despite all the stentorian voices and Praetorian Guards. There is that arc of justice…. One last parting word: those whom the gods wish to destroy, they leave them to do so by their own tarnished hands, the workings of their crippled minds.
After 75 years, the PPP should be grey with wisdom. It is green allover from gorging too much. Thus, a party of evvel great local renown has poisoned itself, withers away deformed limb by diseased limb. I had to tell a man of God the other day that he is both ignorant and arrogant, two of the deadlier sins. There are those in the PPP of today to whom those two words fit perfectly. Thus, they self-destruct. It shouldn’t have come to this poignant place after 75 years in Guyana’s trenches and towers.