…for his pension
Moses Nagamootoo’s greatest betrayal is not to the memory of the man he cringingly insisted on calling “Pa” – Cheddi Jagan – but to the people of Guyana. The betrayal is that he keeps insisting with his forked tongue – from a straight face! – that the PNC’s in a “six-seat coalition”. In accepting his rubber stamp status, he singlehandedly destroyed the idea of coalitions as a mechanism for dealing with Guyana’s fractured politics.
A couple of nights ago, at an Essequibo Coast PNC Rally, he insisted that the “one-party rule is a recipe for dictatorship”. He was referring to the PPP and, of course, contrasting it to the “PNC’s six-party coalition”. But as a fella who boasts about being in politics for five-plus decades – and is now in bed with the PNC – he should know better. What did the “coalition” that Burnham formed with the UF in 1964 to throw out the PPP lead to? Wasn’t it the dictatorship that lasted for 28 long years?? Which Nagamootoo claims to have fought?
As usual, Nagamootoo has his argument half-assed backwards. In Guyana, it hasn’t been the single party Govt that led to dictatorship. It’s the “coalition” the PNC cobbles together to sneak into government – like a wolf in sheep’s clothing – which they subvert into the dictatorship!! The Machiavellian Burnham left the PNC with his credo: tell them whatever they want to hear, but keep power in the party!!
The PPP had two stabs at forming the Government. In their first go between 1957 and 1964, did they form a dictatorship?? In their second go between 1992 and 2015, did they form a dictatorship?? Did they rig elections to hold on to power? Did they assassinate their political opponents? Nagamootoo shamelessly said “the corrupt PPP” made Guyana the killing fields of the Caribbean and those are days that should never return”!!
Was it the PPP that protested the 1997 elections and “wuk pon Janet” to force the woman under whose skirts he’d worked for donkey’s years, truncate her term of office and resign?? Was it the PPP that launched “mo fyaah; slow fyaah”? Was it the PPP that broke out of Camp Street jail and held up in Buxton to create mayhem on the East Coast?? The “killing fields” ran red with blood between 2000 and 2008, when Nagamootoo was an Executive Member of the PPP and would’ve participated in every decision the party made. Is he saying that he helped orchestrate the mayhem?
But we return to the present, where, for a mess of pottage, Nagamootoo is telling the Guyanese people he was in a “coalition”.
But couldn’t say “coo”!!
…anti-foreign investment
The bauxite union under Lincoln Lewis is prone to extreme xenophobic language when it comes to dealing with the Russian corporation RUSAL and their relationship with their workers. Now your Eyewitness has no problem with trade unions representing workers as strongly as they can: that’s their mandate. But on the cusp of opening up our economy to foreign corporations because of our imminent oil revenues, we can’t afford to sunder our relations with global supply chains.
RUSAL is the second-largest aluminium company in the world. Does Lewis know of another company that would pick up our high-cost bauxite – deepest overburden; smallest cargo ships etc – without RUSAL economies of scale? What does RUSAL have to do with “Russia rolling into Ukraine with tanks and guns to seize Crimea”? Or with the Palestine/Israel fight? So if Guyanese workers on the FPSO run by Exxon, Hess and CNOOC Lewis will invoke the US invading Vietnam? Or China suppressing the Uighurs??
It is high time Lincoln Lewis be made to understand he can harm our national interests when he enters the realm of foreign policy!
…for citizenship absolution
Two dual-citizen, small-party Presidential Candidates say only the High Court – not GECOM – can disqualify them.
So, like the PNC, they’re violating a constitutional provision that needed “no gloss”??
