“What Cheddi Jagan legacy?” Mr. M Maxwell queries in a letter to the KN of 3/8/13. This piece of damaged goods will be difficult to give away much less sell on the open market to obliterate Dr Cheddi Jagan’s lifelong legacy.
Give Mr. Maxwell credit for his definition that “a legacy has to be something more. It has to be transcendent. It has to seek to change something inherently destructive in a society and to drive that

society to remarkable, positive change.”   Where in the world is only positive change witnessed?
By any means necessary Mr. Maxwell tries to show Dr Jagan without achievements. But even more was achieved before exiting office in the 1960s due to external intervention.  Electrification of the countryside; building UG and the Government Technical Institute; establishing the Black Bush Polder rice development scheme; constructing the Bank of Guyana; establishing the Ruimveldt Industrial Site; the Ruimveldt Housing scheme; making Guyana the breadbasket of the Caribbean; building cottage hospitals across Guyana; establishing the Mon Repos School of Agriculture and establishing Guyana with the best education track record in the Caribbean, all made a difference. The racial balancing of the armed forces in the Special Service Unit (SSU) was a bold, transformational achievement still requiring emulation.

Mr. Maxwell’s concession is “no leader in our modern history has left a decent, positive legacy except for, perhaps, Walter Rodney who tried valiantly to combat racial politics with a multi-cultural and multi-racial political message”.  Irony is not denying Dr Rodney’s profound contributions but instead discrediting others, Marxists included, who faced Mr. Forbes Burnham’s ambition, cunning and wrath.  “The problem with struggle is not what happens during it …. It is what happens after” Mr. Maxwell notes.  Is the current WPA’s congruency within APNU the best and most “remarkable positive change” afterwards, of excellent tribute, which validates the legend’s legacy?

More obvious than Mr. Maxwell’s realises, is his analysis attempting to create a schism to demean both Dr Jagan and Dr Rodney. Mr. Maxwell cannot still be in the dark that the two Marxists had a secret agreement where Dr Rodney was to organise black people and eventually reunite as in the 1950s PPP! Yet he blames Dr Jagan as “equally responsible for bringing this divide to Guyana when ethnic warfare boiled over in the 60s.
Jagan’s role in this ethnic madness destroys every positive aspect of his legacy.” Isn’t’ Mr. Maxwell falling down all over by himself?  He himself asserts that “a legacy can be positive or negative. A legacy can be evaluated by adding the positives and subtracting the negatives to form a final legacy.” Such an abstract evaluation thermometer which he employs can hardly arithmetically quantify racism to pronounce on who is definitely racist, more, or even less racist to evaluate Dr Jagan’s complicity in all Guyana’s race problems.  With Mr. Eusi Kwayana condoning the 1960 riots and actively championing his blackness to partition Guyana, he became an unrepentant, constant thorn against race harmony which still persists. What has changed?

While Mr. Maxwell is realistic to acknowledge that Guyana’s race problems are the biggest hurdle, he himself has no solution for it anyway. He wants the same nonsense to continue as is, notwithstanding federalism, which acknowledges black hopes to politically manage their own destiny.
Conceding that Dr Jagan’s possessed outstanding “personal traits and characteristics, some of it rooted in a Marxist lifestyle” is quickly diluted as if to say so what?   Mr. Maxwell should be reminded that it was Dr Jagan himself who said, “I have been a glasnost Gorbachev long before Gorbachev” even as he prematurely exited the stage without any self-imposed egotistical monument during his time.