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“HE WAS CHOSEN BY (FORMER EXECUTIVE PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER OF THE PPP) DR CHEDDI JAGAN AND SUPPORTED BY THE SENIORS OF THE PPP. HE GAVE HIS BEST AND NOW, AT THE END OF HIS TWO-TERM LIMIT, (HE) HAS BECOME THE SENIOR OF THE PARTY. I CANNOT UNDERSTAND THE FUSS ABOUT WHO WILL BE VOTED AND /OR SELECTED TO BE THE NEXT PPP PRESIDENT. WHEN YOU REFLECT, PRESIDENT JAGDEO’S TENURE WAS NOT WITHOUT MANY CHALLENGES. HE LEARNED ON THE JOB. THIS EXPERIENCE CAN BE A GREAT RESOURCE FOR THE NEXT PRESIDENT. WHEN IT IS ALL SAID AND DONE, I WOULD LIKE TO SAY THANK YOU, MR.PRESIDENT, AND I KNOW YOU HAVE THE COUNTRY AT HEART. LIKE THE EX-PRESIDENTS OF THE USA, I TRUST THAT YOU WILL CONTINUE DOING GOOD FOR GUYANA ET AL.” Don Gomes – blog dated 6th April 2010`
His Excellency President Bharrat Jagdeo was born on 23 January 1964 in the village of Unity on the East Coast of Guyana.
An economist by profession, he entered public service in Guyana’s State Planning Secretariat in 1990. After the restoration of democracy in Guyana in 1992, President Jagdeo became the Junior Minister of Finance one year later. Rapid promotion ensued and President Jagdeo became Senior Minister of Finance in 1995 at the young age of 31.
As Minister of Finance, the President led the production of Guyana’s National Development Strategy, with the support of former US President Jimmy Carter’s Carter Centre. This precipitated collusion between the Carter Centre and President Jagdeo, working with leaders in Africa, who drew on Guyana’s experience with its National Development Strategy for lessons that could be applied in other countries.
After the retirement of former President Janet Jagan due to illness, the quiet, reserved, almost shy Bharrat Jagdeo was appointed as Guyana’s President in 1999, propelling him unceremoniously into the public glare. At age 35, he was one of the youngest Heads of Government in the world. In 2001, President Jagdeo was elected as President, with overwhelming support from the masses, and quite distinct from his appointment by his Party. This overwhelming support from the masses was underlined and solidified when he was re-elected in September of 2006.
The faith of the PPP and its founding leaders, former Executive Presidents Dr. and Mrs. Jagan, and, most importantly, the people of the nation in this young economist, was vindicated as President Jagdeo’s tenure in office saw unprecedented social and economic reform in Guyana, with improved access to education, rehabilitation of the health system, far-reaching land reform, the biggest expansion of the housing sector in Guyana’s history, expansion of the water and sanitation systems, and large-scale development of the road, river and air transport networks.
Paralleling these major developmental achievements was the substantial reduction of Guyana’s national debt, from in excess of 94 percent of Guyana’s annual income to a mere four percent, the passing of new public procurement and competition laws, and reforms implemented to the tax, fiscal and investment regimes.
While opposition elements were calling him very nasty names, such as “beggar”, and even worse, as an economist, 
Guyana’s President knew that he had to be practical because servicing Guyana’s crippling debt, inflicted on this nation by the former regime, was relentlessly constricting the fiscal flow to the heart of Guyana’s economy – the national exchequer, and severely inhibiting Guyana’s developmental graph. Even as Finance Minister, along with his mentor President, Dr. Cheddi Jagan, he recognized the imperative of an urgent angioplasty in the form of debt relief through debt forgiveness in order to free up Guyana’s resources for economic, social and infrastructural reforms and, initially with Dr. Jagan, then subsequently alone, Bharrat Jagdeo drove a dynamic crusade that finally freed this nation from the shackles of a crippling debt burden.
In September of 2005, President Jagdeo was elected Chairman of the Board of Governors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a position he occupied until September 2006.
He was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award by the Government of India in 2004, and the Pushkin Medal by the Government of Russia in 2007. In January of 2010, Guyana’s President was conferred with an Honorary Doctorate by the People’s Friendship University of Russia during the commemoration of that university’s 50th anniversary.
In 2005, Bharrat Jagdeo underwent scrutiny in a rigorous system and became part of the Forum of Young Global Leaders, which is an affiliate of the World Economic Forum. He has been lauded for his wise fiscal guidance of this nation’s economy by world powerful multilateral financial institutions, such as the World Bank, the IDB, the IMF, which has seen stability and even growth in Guyana’s macro-economic fundamentals, even while the economies of powerful first-world nations were collapsing like houses of cards. The impact of the global financial crisis to this nation’s financial and business sector was minimal to the point of being scarcely felt. As a consequence Guyana’s development trajectory continues unabated on its upward curve.
When the rest of CARIFORM, except for Haiti’s heroic Rene Preval, deserted and derogated his stance against the Draconian EPA being imposed on the ACP countries by the EU, he held firm and won their respect and the reforms that he was advocating. Since then member-states of the CARICOM countries have recognized his exceptional leadership qualities and his commitment to a regional identity, with the prerequisite unity of intent and purposes, which should be solidified by the CSME, and are consistently appointing him head of CARICOM delegations to various fora – regionally and internationally.
It will be recorded that his was the decision to end the Suriname/Guyana border imbroglio once and for all, which was a heroic stance indeed, because if the decision had gone counter to the nation’s interest he would have been relentlessly vilified by the perennial doomsayers and naysayers.
But within this multiplicity of efforts and achievements by President Jagdeo, his passionate championship of Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) has taken the world like a storm, and his advocacy of the need for developing countries to be in the fore in identifying solutions to avert the worst extremes of climate change has won him kudos at international fora, and plaudits from some of the most powerful personages in the world.
Speaking in early 2008, President Jagdeo said:
“Despite the fact that our economy is suffering because most of our productive land is being impacted by rising water levels, we do not want to wallow in endless c
omplaints about the injustice that climate change represents. Instead, we want to be part of a global coalition that stimulates innovation and creativity to enable us to leapfrog over the high-carbon development path that today’s business-as-usual trajectory suggests we must follow.
“As part of our commitment, we are willing to place almost our entire rainforest – which is larger than England – under the supervision of an internationally mandated body. We will do this if we can access the right market mechanisms to make it economically worthwhile.
“We will not sacrifice sovereignty over our forest, and we will do nothing that blunts the life opportunities of our people. We will ensure that solutions are fair and equitable and that, as they are developed, all our people will have the chance to participate in devising them; but providing these fundamentals are respected, we stand ready to work with partners to implement a visionary strategy that combines sustainable forestry and accelerating the development of a low-carbon economy.”
As a consequence of President Jagdeo’s consistent advocacy for urgent action on climate change, Time Magazine and CNN named the President as one of their “Heroes of the Environment 2008”, among other signal honours from other world bodies.
Norway has already signed on board with Guyana’s LCDS, as has Canopy Capital.
On Earth Day, Thursday April 22, 2010, Guyana’s President Jagdeo was awarded the 2010 Champion of the Earth Award by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). His was a special award for Biodiversity Conservation and Ecosystem Management.
He returned to a hero’s welcome in his home country .
Notably, Stabroek News, which discredits every achievement of this Government, and every honour won for this country by its President, carried not a line of this very newsworthy event. Instead they carried a very derogatory cartoon depicting the President as contributing to the sea of garbage in the city.
Watch it, Stabroek News, your slips are showing, and it is not a pretty sight. Your much-vaunted objectivity is in tatters and the once-pristine garment is now becoming a rag.
The Political Parties that the Kaieteur News and the Stabroek News unashamedly support, and their satellites and affiliates, such as the APA, Christopher Ram, Freddie Kissoon, must be gnashing their teeth and rending their garments at this further honour bestowed on Guyana’s President, whose character they continually assassinate in their bid for power, even to the extent where they discredit development initiatives and derail funding meant to fuel the implementation of those initiatives, even though their efforts negatively impact on Guyana’s poor and vulnerable. They consider no act too low if it would seduce potential voters to cast their ballots to put them in the seat of Government.
They disregard the fact that honour won for this country by its President impacts on the national identity and empowers our nation.
Yesterday a reception was held at the Guyana International Conference to honour President Jagdeo. Speakers were Messrs Kiari Tinguiri, UN Resident Coordinator; Marco Nicolo, IDB Resident Representative; Roger Luncheon, Cabinet Secretary; Donald Ramotar, General Secretary of the PPP; Ramesh Dookhoo, Chairman of the PSC; Prime Minister Samuel Hinds, and Ms. Yvonne Pearson, Chairman of the national Touchaos Council.
Speaking to a packed to capacity audience, which included members of the Diplomatic Corps and representatives of various world bodies, Cabinet members, and members of the Private and Public sectors, as well as various stakeholders, President Jagdeo eschewed the plaudits showered upon him, saying that there are bigger issues to be addressed, such as creating a better world and the way we interact with the world, the kind of future we want to build in Guyana, and the kind of world we want to leave for posterity, rather than paying tribute to a single person.
According to the President, from all the assessments done by almost every academy of science in every developed country in the world, they have recognized that the world is moving toward disaster – “to catastrophic changes caused by anthropogenic action,” and they have also recognized that the current development model that has delivered a lot of wealth to the developed world is unsustainable.
President Jagdeo said that the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate C
hange has reinforced this message, and that Lord Storm has calculated the cost factor to fixing this global dilemma. He reiterated that the discussion centers on life on Planet Earth, and the quality of life that the future holds for mankind. He said that climate change is a global phenomenon where borders and walls, or immigration policies, cannot keep any one country safe from its terrible effects and consequences, because the entire world is being impacted.
Drawing verbal diagrams on the dangers climate change pose to the existence of mankind on Planet Earth, President Jagdeo says that if an assessment of the changes climate change poses to us, simply from an economic perspective, then it would be evident that small countries like Guyana would not be able to deal with the catastrophic consequences.
Obviously alluding to the paean of praises constantly being showered upon him, President Jagdeo said, “This is not out of the brains of Jagdeo or the PPP/Civic Government – that we want to be involved. This is out of necessity. And people should not be praised for that, because, if we do not fix this problem, if the world continues to warm up, then the forests that we so cherish will die.”
