The middle finger that no one wanted to stop--Freddie Kissoon

JUNE 18, 2015 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER FEATURES / COLUMNISTS, FREDDIE KISSOON

I am not on Facebook but daily I hear from my friends about what takes place on social media on Guyanese topics. I have been told that there has been strong support for medical doctor, Vindya Persaud, PPP Parliamentarian in the 10th Parliament, for speaking out on the mistakes her government made. In her enumeration of egregious traits of her colleagues, she singled out Clement Rohee’s middle finger to the press after he voted and was walking onto the roadway. One is tempted to ask Persaud where she was on the millions of occasions when Rohee misbehaved and no doubt heaped disrespect on the nation. Let us assume she was not in a position to have Rohee disciplined on those countless times. Surely she and many other young Turks in the PPP must have known the day would come when really deplorable behaviour of PPP leaders would come to haunt them terribly. That day has arrived and Dr. Persaud is now lamenting it. It is not hard to figure why the PPP lost the 2015 elections. Dr. Persaud cites some powerful factors. Even if you argue that the humongous waves of Indians didn’t land on the shores of the AFC during the 2015 elections, there were significant numbers of Indian ballots that went to the AFC that probably would have stayed with the PPP if there were some moral worth in the PPP, and those Indian voters saw those values. This never happened. It was a complete act of madness to have installed Clement Rohee as the de facto leader of the PPP. Rohee was always bad publicity for the PPP. Then he became the PPP’s General-Secretary and bad publicity went to credibility disaster. His last act of indiscretion as a monarch was the middle finger thing that Dr. Persaud found disgusting. One can well imagine what went through the minds of the second tier leadership of the PPP like Dr. Persaud as they watched the antics of Rohee, Charles Ramson Senior and Neend Kumar on television. It wasn’t hard to guess. They would have shouted, “Oh my God, what is this?” Charles Ramson Snr was bad for the image of the PPP but no one intervened. You come from another country without any knowledge of Guyana and you see the then Attorney-General in front of the media, and you know such a person should not be a leading Minister in a government. Sports is an obsession on Planet Earth and to have had Neend Kumar as Guyana’s Sports Director for 22 years, showed that the PPP monarchs were either the dumbest people in the world or the most insensitive. Think of what an international cricket icon like Clive Lloyd had to go through when listening to Kumar. What went through Lloyd’s mind when he read in the press about the awful conduct of Kumar? As in the situations with Ramson and Rohee, there were opportune moments to redeploy Kumar. But the leadership of the PPP just didn’t have the moral standing to discipline anyone who belonged to the party. There was the goat-killing incident at the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall. Then Kumar told Guyanese that they must understand they have to bathe before using a swimming pool so the reconstituted Colgrain structure could not be made available to the public. Then came the big one. Kumar didn’t know what the ABC countries are. Instead of America, Britain and Canada, he turned them into Argentina, Brazil and Chile. That was enough to put him in another area with the same salary to make him feel good but surely not in sports anymore because Kumar had become an embarrassment. But the PPP, from Jagdeo to Ramotar right down to Kwame McCoy were beyond embarrassment The PPP lost by nearly 5000 votes and there were more than 5000 East Indians who were urbane, cultivated and well-mannered to know that such an East Indian Government did not deserve their vote. It must be painful for PPP supporters to know they lost by 5000 votes which probably could have come their way with the utterance of simple line, “I am sorry.” Only two high level operatives in the PPP have ever apologized to the nation since 1992. President Jagan for publicly saying that African people around the world were always at the bottom of the economic ladder, was one. And GOINVEST Head, Geoff Da Silva who apologized at a press conference at the Pegasus for awarding concessions to Bobby Ramroop that were outside of the law, was the other. Robert Persaud in a recent Facebook comment suggested that God will have to help Guyana if Rohee becomes the Opposition Leader. I guess so.