The People’s Progressive Party combines the worst things about Guyana : Bharrat Jagdeo punctuated by its ideology.
It’s not implausible to think that his decades of sulfurous rhetoric and his regurgitation of lines he recited without comprehending when he was in Jagans’ boot camp can still inspire those who prefer to have their politics rationed and pre- packaged into limericks of name association and number strings that have increments of ten, not for authenticity but for ease of recall….
Take, for example, this nugget of dung -“how can the second largest ethnic group(30%), dominate the Police, Army, government offices and ministries, and leaving the Indian majority (at least 40%) unemployed or underemployed!” – offered by one of the couriers of his disinformation who remains sufficiently baffled by his own submission that he is decidedly unable to cite the source of the numbers that he deploys more to raise the rabid temperature than to inform.
It’s the old iron curtain flame throwing tactic mastered by these political Lilliputians whose strategy is to engage the perceived enemy by goading them in to validating a lie by finding proof to its contrary.
The argument from ignorance – a charlatan’s doctrine…lying is free speech …it’s up to you to prove it wrong…and if you don’t it’s right …which is why the the PPP, characteristically undignified in the process, picked upon transient Afro Haitians in what has to be its most scandalous jujitsu to connect race with voter fraud and the Coalition Parties which attract more Afro Guyanese voters…even when the forensic detail spotlights the stark nakedness of its lies.
While there’s no denying purpose in Political Opposition, few would claim Opposition for its own sake was its purpose, except the People’s Progressive Party under its present leadership that insists on ongoing upheaval, ethno racially charged accusations and any combination of these variants to promote a leader and an incendiary style that takes the place of professional substance – and on purpose.
Jagdeo, prolific enough to have made Lying his Party’s predominant pathology, is a style-less fabricator whose mendacity is more reflex than it is any fathomable strategy. He has fashioned a manically fraudulent apparatus that he runs as a political vehicle and though some would say that it’s a good thing that it attracts only a specific set of people, it is to the peril of national polity that he has the opportunity to cover it in a blizzard of lies while burying the misdeeds of his Party’s government(s) beneath an avalanche of bullshot.
The ideology he peddles is, principally, a one-dimensional iteration of alleging loss of everything to everyone who is not sufficiently East Indian, should he and his Party not be in power- which places Afro Guyanese in the bullseye of that target.
And with no national plan in hand, this default one always works…the one patented by the founding Jagans’ who crafted the art of capitalizing on the cultish docility of their followers by bombarding them with notions of injustice, declining social status and overall loss… if they were ever to allow anyone but themselves to rule Guyana.
A few weeks ago, we got one reason why Bharrat mounted multiple flights of Court steps immediately after that MP’s No Confidence Motion defection to enforce his presumed victory, then showed such mortal fear of House to House Registration while he developed the equivalent to political anaphylactic shock upon learning that the Attorney General was seeking clarification on removing names from the List of Electors and clarifying Residency Requirements to vote in the country’s elections… a recreational loophole for the mobilized voting junkets that fly out of overseas Opposition enclaves to cast a vote, to further the preservation of the ideology of the PPP that subordinates its national agenda to its Indian First commitment.
Quantities of birth certificates forged for name, date of birth, residence and other unique identifiers were discovered during the dreaded House to House by diligent registrars.
And instead of making their defence centered around why “Leon, age 13, is on its voter list” the PPP, under the rancid auspices of a similarly characterized Jagdeo, launched a disinformation campaign through its multi tier outlets to chastise the Coalition for discovering registration irregularities by deploying the usual mash of unsubstantiated accusations of Government irregularities by engaging the public from the latrines of politics.
With unstoppable frequency, Bharrat lies. The intention may be to saturate the space with his presence because, as one quasi wannabe politician fondly referred to as the cockroach of politics likes to say, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about and since Jagdeo is incomparably authentically false, he may as well use his god-given talents to own the space…especially since he’s allowed to hang his lies out to dry without challenge.
The response is typically reactionary and in the liar’s favor because the Coalition’s reply, when it finally makes its appearance, is usually to say that he’s lying, without showing us why.
In politics, the visual is everything and coming from a liar who has a highly evolved propensity to do so, the lack of show and tell will never convince many that he’s not lying, especially his followers whose collective consciousness has been altered by choice.
There are facts and there are beliefs and there are things some are so conditioned to believe they become facts to them.
Head lines blare in media like Stabroek News complete with a single copy of an alleged map of 1000 acres given to an ex Coalition employee and it becomes an argument from that employee who takes to the media to recall his qualifications as defense against improprieties and conflicts of interest , he being a servant to the people of Guyana and charged with trust.
Jagdeo, not because he’s shrewd or anything, knows that there’s a lack of Coalition protocol in place concerning agents of the Government replying to and in media because there’s a repeat offender’s history here and usually to the embarrassment of the Coalition.
It would have been informative for the unit responsible for handling media to respond to the public by citing the thousands of acres that Jagdeo has given away to ordinary citizens under 99 year leases to his party donors and members who do not pay taxes on said leases, under an ideology that does not benefit the nation as a whole.
So, the whole qualifications thing – and this ex employee’s are not at all unique except most did not go to Queens College- does not present immunity against impropriety and that became the talking point, along with the fact that the employee was awarded the Nation’s Golden Arrow of Achievement in May of 2019 then forced to resign under scandal in July of 2019… taking down the Coalition and it’s leader to a level below the talking point of a single person’s award of land and not the massive theft and award of national patrimony that occurred under Jagdeo and his Party’s 23 year dictatorship, allegedly.
Deceitful behavior has a long and storied history in the PPP’s evolution and the appended Civic to its acronym left its original initialism uninterrupted.
Evidence- based declarations are not only an alien concept but deliberately alienated in favor of slash and burn predictions and buffoonish performances- the premier one being Bharrat stomping out of the Nation’s 50th Independence celebrations because he and a bunch of people that look like him were not allowed to sit together like king and commune in the land of six peoples.
Their promiscuity with the truth should always be highlighted.
Here are a few of their perversions of fact:
- They lost the elections in 2015, Jagdeo says “Elections Rigged”
- Granger touts Green Economy Jagdeo says “be more specific” while, under his Administration, Guyana ranked 108 out of 149 countries in 2008 on environmental performance and 20th out of 28 countries in 2010 with him handing over a waste management disaster and polluted beaches to the Coalition in 2015.
- Coalition touts Crime Fighting measures. Jagdeo, under whom the country became a Heavily Indebted Poor Country, was labelled a drug, money laundering, weapons and human trafficking hub by the international community and was forced to meet Millennium Development Goals says “Coalition Government Sympathetic to Criminals”.
These folks are not just deeply pathological but barefacedly so. And the question is not why but how much more preposterous they can get without the country being snubbed even more by the international community…oil and all.
Maybe it’s a design flaw in our two- party system; the decades of electorate docility combined with the racial schism created during Colonialism that ascribed a nomenclature to races that became the thing that has divided them to this day; that maintains fertile ground for the lies and bad faith that politicians ride in on.
A lil bit of hypocrisy for good measure is anticipated during campaigns but a blitzkrieg of lies and systemic bad faith on this epic scale, coming from the PPP that just happened to have a Coalition MP defect to them, must be called for what it is.
Is there a way to solve these problems, we wonder?
Indeed, the list of diagnoses are long while the prescriptions are short but the one thing that the last 23 years of PPP strangulation was not COMPLETELY able to dislodge – despite the hundreds of amendments to the Constitution it made during its tenure and the desecration of the National Motto by citing the Amerindians for special praise in the Constitution’s preamble as a prostitute’s move to secure that voting block- is the electorate’s right to vote.
And that’s the number one prescription; Voting Decisively against Jagdeo and his PPP.
In previous Opinion Editorials we established that Jagdeo and his PPP are a Party of Bad Faith.
We’d like to upgrade that.
They are now a Party of Relentless Bad Faith and with the backfired opportunity Guyanese have been gifted to go to the polls under these concocted conditions, they have an even longer yard stick with which to measure the people they want to represent them in the halls of Parliament.
Featuring disavowals of the Coalition by Afro Guyanese, along with Candidates posing with “Africans” , is unequivocal demonstration that the PPP remains what it vehemently denies…as it retains its signature sleaze and absence of principles.
With trademark dirty tricks, Jagdeo is doing everything he could to return to the treasury in the era of oil. ” We are standing up for all Guyanese ” … even this metaphor is a lie…standing up for all Guyanese by inveiglement …really.
But the pot of gold at the end of the oil rainbow is enticing enough for him to strive for new heights with his public and constant assault on the nation’s civic discourse by his brazen falsifications – as he continues to sink to the challenge of demonstrating that there is no such thing as rock bottom.
Look.
The man was never a finesse player, maybe because his skill set is such a glove fit for bad faith.
And after all these years of trial with mostly error, he still brings a garish, unsubtle game – with his bad faith arguments skimpily clad in language that exposes their ill intent.
Historical events and individuals always appear twice, first as tragedy and then as farce… Karl Marx…on Napoleon and his nephew Louis Bonaparte.
The PPP/Jagdeo machine has already had its 23 years of tragedy…and the last 52 months of farce, rife with self serving plots and disruptions, eliminate them from credibility to govern, as it affirms that the Jagdeo machine is indeed the caricature of a governing body we always felt it was.
Traipsing back and forth to Gecom to solicit conversation then unilaterally declaring it fruitful, with a date for Elections being in his favor, files neatly under posturing and confirms Jagdeo and his Party’s conscientious commitment to Relentless Bad Faith.
