PRIME Minister Moses Nagamootoo and Dr Joey Jagan, son of Former President and PPP leader, Cheddi Jagan, spoke of how the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) strayed to corruption and mismanagement after opposition leader Bharrat Jagdeo took over leadership.

Speaking to a massive gathering last week at the A Partnership for National Unity+Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) mini rally in Rosignol, Nagamootoo, a former executive of the PPP/C, shared with the gathering what prevailed in the PPP/C in his last days with the party.

Attempts to get the party to return to being an upright party saw him being ousted from the party. “I was pushed out or kicked out in 2011 when I couldn’t take anymore of seeing people being paid in death squads to murder young people in this country; of seeing leaders in bed with the drug lords; of seeing ministers in government having their visas revoked they couldn’t travel abroad; of looking at our country when nobody wanted to invest in our Guyana,” Nagamootoo expressed.

Nagamootoo also noted the disrespect and ill treatment meted out to many Guyanese in the international arena because of the level to which the PPP/C had taken the country. “Looking at Guyanese trying to hustle a living being prevented from entering Trinidad or being put on a bench in Barbados waiting on a plane to be deported,” Nagamootoo recalled.
A former teacher, journalist and lawyer, Nagamootoo first joined the PPP/C in 1964. He served in various roles through the ranks of the party, first serving as a parliamentarian under the PPP/C from 1992, serving in various government posts under the presidencies of Cheddi Jagan, Janet Jagan, Samuel Hinds and Bharrat Jagdeo during the party’s years in power.

He remained a member of parliament with the party until 2011 when he resigned. He would later that same year join the Alliance For Change (AFC), which would go on to become a component of the governing coalition. Nagamootoo said he could no longer take what the party was becoming following the 1997 death of the party’s founder Cheddi Jagan, and particularly when the party fell into the hands of former President Jagdeo, who served as president from 1999 – 2011.

“We have seen after the death of Cheddi Jagan, how Baby Judas betrayed our country and our people at the altar of self-interest. I have seen them, I observed them, I opposed them. I tried to make the PPP a reformed party after the death of Cheddi,” Nagamootoo said, under Jagdeo’s leadership when corruption and nepotism abounded.

“I have lived through the Pradoville One and Two and the way they distributed the resources of this country to their friends. When they handed out television and radio licences and contracts to their friends,”

There still remains unanswered questions, Nagamootoo said, of how several PPP/C affiliates accrued, including Jagdeo himself.

“How do you account for someone, the president of this country, working for $500,000 per month owning a colonial mansion worth $300 million dollars. Or a minister with a pool house and pool, how do you explain [that to] someone,” Nagamootoo questioned.

Putting the PPP/C back in power would undo much of the development that the country has seen over the past four and a half years under the APNU+AFC’s time in office.

Joey Jagan, meanwhile, noted that when compared, the people within the APNU+AFC government, stand above those who prevailed during the PPP/C’s time in government. Joey said he has put his full trust in President David Granger’s ability to lead the country to prosperity over the next five years.

“When we compare the basic level of the people Mr. Granger has picked to run this country and who Bharrat Jagdeo picked when he was president there’s no comparison at all. I could judge people by looking and hearing what they have to say, and I have a trust that I have found in Mr Granger. I like Mr Granger and the people that he has around him,” Joey said to massive applause.

Joey noted that even as the PPP/C continues to put forth Irfaan Ali as the presidential candidate for the party in the March 2 elections, he is just a front so Jagdeo remains at the helm of the party.

Having served two terms as president, Jagdeo is barred from ever serving as President of Guyana again, a constitutional requirement that Jagdeo himself instituted, notwithstanding challenging the stipulation in court. “We have a man who wants to be president again and has a puppet on top of him. Look at his record, he didn’t lead us anywhere, he did nothing for us. His own people the sugar workers who my father invested heavily in he did nothing for them,” Joey said.

Under the PPP/C Guyana’s sugar industry, at the time the country’s largest economic activity, saw drastic decline; billions was poured into keeping the estates afloat, as they were making heavy losses when the PPP/C was ousted from government in 2015. The PPP/C is still to account for what became of the portion of the Euro166.67M ($34.4B) that was given to Guyana between 2006 and 2015, and was expected to go to programmes that mitigated the effects of the declining sugar industry.

As part of the Accompanying Measures for Sugar Protocol (AMSP), the EU doled out billions of dollars, in various tranches, to the PPP/C government, as adjustment to the 2006 reform of the EU’s sugar regime, which saw the implementation of a phased 36 per cent price-cut for countries that sold sugar to the EU. The money represented a fraction of an entire EURO$1.25B that was dispersed across a number of African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries to promote the economic diversification of sugar-dependent areas.