Why did Black people wait until 23 years?

OCTOBER 12, 2015 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER FEATURES / COLUMNISTS, FREDDIE KISSOON

Ethnic instincts are very strong. In ethnically riveted polities, racial incitement is easily whipped up. People have a part of their mind that they assign to irrational sentiments so they are vulnerable to ethnic propaganda. But equally competing (perhaps the analogy is Freud’s distinction of the competing EGO, ID and SUPEREGO) is a part of their mind where rationality fights and inevitably overcomes the vulnerability to irrationality. Two vivid examples are so phenomenal that they must be described. Black South Africans accepted that after the election of Mandela to the Presidency, they would have to co-exist with Whites rather than confront and defeat them and that even if Mandela had enemies in the Black population that would have used race to incite Blacks against Whites, the South African Blacks would not have done so. This is what is called the rational mind. The second example was the election of Barack Obama. In 2008 even if all the non-white and Black American voters had given Obama all their votes, he could not have won. White Americans balloted for a Black candidate in substantial numbers. This is where the rational mind shuts out racial incitement. There is constant exodus of American born Jews to the US from Israel. Three decades ago, American Jews migrated to Israel in huge numbers. But the return began more than ten years ago because American Jews are not happy with the war-mongering attitude of Israeli born Jews toward a Palestinian state. The rational mind is not a fertile bed for race hate. This has been a long introduction to the analysis below of some aspects of Jagdeo’s race-baiting speech in New York last week. Jagdeo spoke about GECOM staff being predominantly African Guyanese. From 1992 to 2015 and up to the time of writing, GECOM’s staff has been predominantly Black. From 1992 up to May 2015 when the PPP lost the General Elections, the police force and the army have been predominantly Black. Mr. Jagdeo was speaking to an exclusively Indian audience. The PPP draws its support exclusively from Guyana’s Indian demography. It is natural then for Indians to offer the PPP leadership, now in opposition, a sympathetic ear. But the rational mind has to kick in. Here are some counter-arguments to Jagdeo’s advocacy in New York that the Indian rational mind has to accept because rejecting them can only be done by a mind that is irrational. If Black employees in GECOM rigged the 2015 election to put a Black party in power, why did they wait for twenty three years during which time Mr. Jagdeo dominated Guyana for fifteen years and pursued Indian hegemony? I did a study of Jagdeo in power titled; “Ethnic Power and Ideological Racism: Comparing Presidencies in Guyana.” That study, replete with names and statistics, reveals that the engineering of ethnic placements in the public sector in general was extensive and intensive. In the first twelve years of PPP tenure – 1992 to 2000 – there were large-scale ethnic replacements in the public sector. Under Jagdeo’s reign, Guyana’s class structure went through deep transformation. If Hoyte’s Economic Recovery Programme birthed a nascent Indian nouveau riche stratum, by the time the Jagdeo/Ramotar cabal lost power, that formation had displaced the traditional Indian commercial petty bourgeois and Indian landed oligarchic class. So intricate was the intertwining between class and ethnicity, that African-rights activists had leveled a charge of economic genocide against Jagdeo. The rational Indian mind, if it accepts Jagdeo’s arguments and accusations that he used in New York, has to ask itself just one logical question. If Blacks in Guyana so hated the PPP and frenetically wanted the Indian government removed, then why did a Black GECOM, Black public service, Black police force, Black army wait for twenty-three years. The most banal analogy should suffice. I wanted to steal your new car badly. Why would I wait until you batter it up for twenty years then risk police intervention by stealing it? That is something you only find in comic books. And comic books are the perfect phrase to use to dissect that New York speech of Jagdeo. Jagdeo is telling Indian minds that one day in 2015, Black people in GECOM woke up and said, let us rig the elections and throw out the PPP. If they did do it, then it will remain Guyana’s greatest puzzle as to why they waited for twenty three-years to act. The rational Indian mind has to reject the comic books Jagdeo gave them in New York last weekend. Gecom didn’t rig the 2015 elections. The PPP lost because of Jagdeo’s arrogance, power madness and insane corruption.