The Jagan legacy and the PPP! stabroeknews Editorial

This time former President Bharrat Jagdeo has really stirred up a hornet’s nest. At a press conference on March 10, he told reporters that his upscale home and the rapid accumulation of wealth by PPP ministers would be within the late President Cheddi Jagan’s ideals. Not feeling the need to stop there, he then invited further trouble by saying: “I don’t think Cheddi Jagan, living in Bel Air Park at that time, in a nice house, was typical of Guyana…

“At that time that was a prime area. It was a big piece of land, nice house and it still is a nice house. Did that weaken his commitment to the cause? Did that make him corrupt…?”

Cheddi and Janet Jagan did not live in Bel Air Park, of course, but in what was then called Plantation Bel Air, which was a far cry from being a middle-class area at the time. But the confusion of locations was not the main source of anguish to those close to the two former presidents; the aspersions cast on their lifestyle was. Even the Jagans’ greatest detractors would not think of hinting, let alone claiming outright, that the PPP’s founder was anything but scrupulously honest with the people’s money, and extremely modest and humble in his lifestyle. The same, it must be added, was true of Janet Jagan as well.

And as for the Jagans’ house, Mr Ralph Ramkarran was the first to give an account of the acquisition of the land and the construction of the building which completely discredited Mr Jagdeo’s ramblings on the subject. The problem for Mr Jagdeo, of course, is that too many people are familiar not just with the exterior but also with the interior of the house; after all the whole of the PPP hierarchy will have been inside it, not to mention hundreds of other people, including those who had no connections whatever to the party. They can all attest to the fact that it is by anyone’s standards a very modest home, and was already a very modest home at the time it was built.

Mr Ramkarran was followed – embarrassingly for Freedom House – by Ms Nadira Jagan-Brancier, the Jagans’ daughter, who a few years ago at a Babu John commemoration to her parents had rebuked the PPP for departing from their principles. She expressed her “disappointment” that Mr Jagdeo would “defend his opulent lifestyle by pathetically claiming that my parents also lived in a large house in an affluent community. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Ms Sadie Amin, a former personal assistant to Mrs Janet Jagan, recounted how when the roof of the house was leaking, Mrs Jagan would use the pots and pans to catch the drips, and it was only when she ran out of containers that Dr Jagan, who was notoriously frugal, agreed to have the roof fixed. During her presidency, Mrs Jagan preferred to live in her own home. “When it came to humility, simplicity and integrity with the public purse,” she wrote, “only the unconscionable among us can even cast a pebble.” Writing in our Friday edition historian Prof Clem Seecharan, who has not been uncritical of Dr Jagan’s Marxist policies, nevertheless described him as belonging to “a very small minority of honourable people to follow the political vocation. For 50 years, he never sought to enrich himself or his family.”

There were other letters too, but the most poignant one came from Dr Tulsi Dyal Singh, who drew attention to Mr Ramkarran’s comment in his column that Dr Jagan had deferred his coronary bypass surgery to coincide with a previously planned trip abroad. Since the surgery at the hospital in Midland, Texas, was to be undertaken free of cost, and he had been advised it should be done urgently, the issue was only a question of saving the taxpayer the cost of the additional airfare (Dr Singh was not aware of the reason for the postponement at the time). The President suffered his heart attack, of course, before life-saving surgery was done. Leaving aside the other disturbing questions this story raises, it illustrates better than any other possibly could, the sheer vulgarity of those who would compare Cheddi Jagan’s attitude to taxpayers’ monies with that of party officials who live in opulence, or flash their two million dollar smiles in public without displaying even a trace of sheepishness.

Exactly why Mr Jagdeo thought it was appropriate to make a comparison between himself and Dr Jagan is a source of puzzlement. He knows how the Jagans lived, and he must have been in their home many times. Was it a case of arrogance whereby he felt he could say anything and get away with it? Was it that he has become so disconnected from the lives of ordinary people that he really doesn’t regard his lifestyle or his home as anything exceptional? Was he hoping that by associating his way of living with that of Dr Jagan he would take the heat off himself? Or was it just a careless remark tossed off without any prior thought?

Whatever the case, Mr Jagdeo has left his party in a predicament. How much of a predicament became clear when, as was reported in our Tuesday edition, PPP General Secretary Clement Rohee became “visibly agitated” after being pressed by the media as to why no one in the party had challenged the former president’s comments. This newspaper for its part had asked if the party itself did not have an obligation to make a statement considering Ms Jagan-Brancier’s expressed “disappointment” in what Mr Jagdeo had said. Mr Rohee’s reply to that could only be described as Delphic. “Depends on what I will say, where I will say it, and who I will say it to,” we quoted him as responding.

It is not just the media, of course, which has been asking why no senior members of the PPP have come out in defence of Dr and Mrs Jagan; so have various correspondents to this newspaper, not the least of whom is Ms Jagan-Brancier. The nature of the Freedom House dilemma is not far to seek: Dr Jagan is revered by the party, and any criticism of him, no matter what form it takes, is always robustly dismissed as ‘historical revisionism.’ What Mr Jagdeo has done, by implication, is to suggest that Dr Jagan’s much touted simple lifestyle was not so simple after all, since it was like that of his own.

As everyone knows, former President Jagdeo was given a pension benefit package which is by any standards excessive, and this might conceivably have played some role in the PPP’s loss of votes in their heartland in 2011. The attempt by the opposition to limit it was thwarted when President Ramotar refused to sign their amendment to the original Bill into law. The erstwhile president enjoys the aforemetioned benefits even although he is hardly unemployed, holding as he does important environmental posts in the international bureaucracy. In addition, everyone knows the size of Mr Jagdeo’s house, and the circumstances surrounding the creation of Pradoville II.

As it is Mr Jagdeo has been slated to play the lead role in the PPP election campaign, as well as being named Chairman of the President’s new economic council. It is also the public perception that he still exerts great influence in Freedom House. So here is the leader of the party campaign impugning the PPP icon. Will the party rebuke him? It does not seem so.

Their strategy to deal with the dilemma was implied by the positioning of a piece in yesterday’s edition of the state paper, covering the ‘Evening of Reflections’ held at the Cheddi Jagan Heritage Home on Wednesday. There was a time – especially in an election year – when such an event with “speaker after speaker examin[ing] the Jagan legacy” as the Chronicle strapline put it, would have been given a front-page banner headline, and not have been placed at the back of the paper. (It was on page 24, the last of the news pages.)

So it seems that the party hierarchy must have decided that this time a more muted approach would be adopted towards the Jagan legacy; Mr Jagdeo is simply too valuable or too dominant within the corridors of Freedom House – or both – to be cautioned, and the legacy, therefore, must give way. The thinking presumably goes, that if the party keeps adverting to the legacy, then those pesky reporters and letter-writers will keep bringing up Mr Jagdeo and his comments, which is something to be avoided if at all possible.

So once again vulgarity triumphs.