By Imran Khan

WORDS matter. Words wound. Words reveal. One remark on Saturday night gave a profound insight into the mind of the Minority Leader Bharrat Jagdeo.

Speaking at a PPP street-side meeting in Kitty before a mere handful of supporters (there are no more GuySuCo trucks to swell the crowds these days), Jagdeo, in his customary frothing at the mouth style, said: “Though these are Local Government Elections…this is about more than City Hall…this is the beginning of the fight to take back our country…”
Now, one’s first thought might be to take Guyana back to where? To that time when his government was in bed with drug trafficker Roger Khan, whose phantom squad executed scores of Guyanese young men? To the time when government critics, Ronald Waddell and Courtney Crum-Ewing were murdered in cold blood? To 2006 when the country’s murder rate reached 162? (NB: this year it will likely be a 15- year low of under 100). To a time when public servants and teachers were paid a pittance and then Minister Rohee said they should be glad for a “lil freck”, even as his colleagues were building mansions by the sea? To that time when Ramotar told a young Amerindian man, “Jagdeo mighta slap yuh, because yuh stupid”?

We could go on but we are more interested in the deeper meaning of Jagdeo’s remark. It fits into a sentiment that is held by many among the country’s elite. Minister Winston Jordan in his long overdue response to a Sunday Stabroek editorial had noted, “It appears that [Stabroek News] didn’t actually want a change of government; rather, it wanted the PPP/C government to change its ways”.

That’s it! They and the elite did not actually want the Coalition, but rather for the PPP to take a time out, to go stand in the corner for five years. Ruel Johnson, my astute and far more erudite comrade, had analysed this argument in an article he called the “Interregnum Sentiment” and it is worth quoting here. “Different perspectives exist on it depending on whether you belong to a certain section of the mainstream middle class, the barely-legal business class, the PPP-embedded public service class or the enabling fifth column in the media. The main thrust of it, is that the PPP is the only possible government for Guyana but its excesses were too public, so its temporary replacement via elections wasn’t unexpected. All the former hierarchs needed to do was roll with the punches for five years, regroup and re-strategise, sideline the dinosaurs like Rohee and Ramotar, and sally forth under Jagdeo 2.0…”

The sentiment that there is only one rightful party or people to run a country is extremely dangerous in any democracy, let alone a multi-ethnic one, but it is of course not unique to Guyana. Many right wing populist politicians in Europe are using the same tactic to gain support among white citizens, who have been scared into thinking immigrants are taking their jobs or presenting terrorist threats. But that’s their country. This is Guyana, and Guyana belongs to all of us regardless of race, religion or social status. Now, it could be argued that Jagdeo was talking about taking the country back from the Coalition. Indeed on Saturday night, he quickly corrected himself to add that, because he must have sensed he had crossed a line. The trouble with excusing him, this time, is that he has used the exact same kind of dog-whistling rhetoric. In a rally on April 26, 2015 he warned supporters, “We must make sure we don’t hand our country over to them.” He did not say who “them” were then, but his supporters understood as they did on Saturday night. In fact, he has a long and well documented history of encouraging race-based voting by stoking ethnic insecurities, most infamously in his speech at Babu Jaan, Corentyne when he said, “The opposition consistently shouts about the racism of the PPP, but they practise racism. The opposition beat drums at six in the morning and say let us throw out those coolie people.”

That quote is well known but there are many others. At a rally in Albion, on April 19, 2015 he predicted, “When they link up with the military and come into your homes and start kicking the doors down and when they come after you, who is going to be there…?”
At the Indian Arrival Committee mela, in Providence on May 2, 2015 he said, “If we allow ourselves to have this freedom snatched away from us then it would be long, dark days for our country again and our ancestors would never be proud of us.”

And most egregiously in recalling the disturbances in Agricola, he claimed, “They sent their thugs…and they feel the women up.” This is as classical as dog whistling gets. In fact, some may argue that it crosses the line into outright racial incitement. Such divisive and destabilising trash talk has zero place in Guyanese politics. It must be condemned and censored. But let’s finish with the ultimate irony: Jagdeo is campaigning in the second local government elections in the three years since 2015; he presided over exactly zero during his 12 years in office. That’s the kind of taking back Jagdeo is calling for: a despotic government that is unaccountable to the people while gorging on state resources. Those days are history as thankfully is the tyrannical Jagdeo regime.