In the annals of history, though it’s still being recorded, lies the name Bharat Jagdeo with an asterisk, then demagogue, con artist and a choice of colorful adjectives that shade his existence with that hue of sentiment.
To recall all that he has done to earn this dubious distinction would be to revisit a political life made possible by racially charged recitations and a hard edged divisiveness that still borders on xenophobia ..so we ain’t gonna do that.
We’re just going to analyze the electoral watchdoggedness he is injecting into the upcoming Local Government Elections, since the Communications arm of the current government seems to think assertions, as damning as the ones Jagdeo makes in this climate of political uncertainty, can go without response; be dismissed as irrelevant.
Carefully sown seeds of doubt, while initially sensationalizing, become prosaic and bear fruit after repeatedly unchallenged assertions … and in this Jagdeo is a champion because he’s matched against a flaccid opponent which invokes a sort of above –the- fray persona, when truth is, it lacks the communications artillery and the message -snipers to obliterate the cheap contrivances of a Jagdeo, whose alleged evil genius is more evil than genius.
With an electorate that is clearly divided along racial lines, it is imperative to show more response than retort and this is where the communications battle meets its demise, most every day and on every issue.
That Bharat Jagdeo is allowed to go scot free when asserting President Granger and current government is poised to rig is a sign of a government too self-absorbed to refute claims that influence opinion.
Bharat has put the rig in rigging and he has done this by both withholding elections when they were constitutionally due, by voting the graveyards…sending people to vote in the name of the dead… and vote buying –paying the marginalized to cast a vote in his favor.
These are all known and well documented occurrences.
Yet, the Government is allowing Jagdeo to make a projection statement, psychological trickery, accusing others of the sins that are far more his own. Bharat has perfected the practice of political distortion by taking his known weaknesses, amplifying them, then accusing his opponents of possessing that very weakness but its mutated form.
So he’s a rigger but Granger is a bigger rigger…and is bigger in every despicable deed that can be ascribed to Bharat. It is a knavish mentality that can be imputed to the few in politics that are at least, dastardly.
Why is this government paralyzed by this known reprobate, shrugging and moving on as if that erases the seed of doubt carefully planted and nurtured in the minds of those will never vote for them and those who just might? Why is there no constructive engagement with the electorate it needs to move its agenda forward? Why is the strategy to shut up and lose?
It is deconstructive for President Granger to think that the coalition is cemented in agenda and failing to appeal to those on its fringes will reduce the likelihood of keeping them.
Communications is a vehicle this Government must stop colliding with by taking control of it. There is dire need to add to the Coalition on the margins and on the right patches of the electoral map. Owning the narrative is critical to this. Persuasion is a category of political activism that is separate from pandering. Partisan rewards are no substitute for craft. The single releases of Opinion Editorials and Face Book pledges to the parties in the coalition are simply no substitute for the bureaucratic machine that is a Political Communications operation.
Lamentably, the 2015 win seems to have driven the Coalition into a corner of complacency; as if the victory after 23 years of despotic rule came at little cost. In actuality, those who voted and those who supported those who voted did so out of a patriotism that should not be conflated with partisanship.
If the APNU, the larger portion of this Coalition, intends to be effective and convincing, it has to show a hard headed realism about politicking – and in toto- that it currently lacks, a major part of which would be its tooling or re-tooling of its lackluster communications team that continues to fall prey to its Opposition, whose Communications are often a cringeworthy demonstration of the mangling of our first language and the ravages of bad grammar that would overshadow its message …. if only there were a message to contrast it against.
There may be confidence in APNU saying that it has the numbers and foppishness in deploying the militant sounding ‘by any means necessary’ but for this APNU, the embattled and larger part of this flailing Coalition, to emerge it needs to come to terms with the fact that it hasn’t yet arrived.
