by Freddie Kissoon, guest columnist
THERE are demands from citizens to have Tacuma Ogunseye charged with incitement to create ethnic violence. But what the society needs to have knowledge of is what the Creole Middle Class (CMC), which includes The Usual Suspects (TUS), nurtured and how it allowed for the fertility of Ogunseye’s mind.
The troubled mind of Ogunseye blossomed in 2002 when the hysteria at Buxton embedded itself in the village. I was at the height of my journalistic career when my investigation revealed Ogunseye’s role in the mayhem. He sued me for libel. My lawyer was Anil Nandlall; his was Mortimer Coddette.
Cordette was a personal friend and so he told me he would not go through with the case. But more importantly, I showed Coddette what I had and he knew testimonies in court would have rocked this nation, so for his own self-interest, he chose not to go through with the case. Onto this day, Ogunseye has not paid the cost the judge awarded me. I guess Mr. Nandlall was not interested in collecting from Ogunseye.
Ogunseye has done it again. The question is what went through his mind. Ogunseye’s advocacy of the violent overthrow of the government by African Guyanese activists with support from the armed state apparatus has its origin in the post-2020 psychology of the CMC and TUS.
To this day, there has been no intellectual analysis of the rabid reemergence of the CMC and its acidic activism against the PPP government since March 2020. Space would not permit a historical background, but the CMC’s attempts to control Guyana after the Burnham government betrayed them have all been failures.
After the triumph of the CMC in the 2015 election, the CMC had concluded that the Indian race and its affiliated political organisations that have been in control of the state since 1992 had now become a thing of the past. But the PPP won the 2020 election and the CMC suffered a nervous breakdown. The loss of power by the mulatto/creole class as expressed especially in the personalities of the leadership of the PNC, AFC, and WPA, in March 2020, is a psychological devastation that the CMC will have a difficult time reconciling itself to.
The Ogunseye expression in Buxton in which he called for the removal of the PPP government by an African uprising with support of the army and police is not an irrational moment by Ogunseye. It has its antecedents in the post-2020 psychology of the CMC.
It is important to document episodes, moments and opportunities after 2020 by the CMC to denigrate, insult and weaken what they see as the return of permanent PPP rule, a nightmare that haunted the Portuguese commercial class and CMC since the forties that climaxed in the acceptance of American destabilisation of the Premier Jagan government and the Wismar massacre.
Here is just a sample. The Deputy Vice Chancellor of UG, Dr. Mellisa Ifill wrote that she goes through this world first and foremost as a Black woman. Guyanese sociologist, Dr. Percy Hintzen proclaimed in the Stabroek News that he lives out his existence as Creole human.
The son of Mulatto poet, Martin Carter never wrote anything in the press but suddenly a letter appeared in the newspapers supporting the behavior of Sherod Duncan in Parliament. The son of Dr. Rory Westmas, the Mulatto politician from the 1950s, never wrote even one line in the letter sections of the newspapers, but recently penned a letter condemning the removal of recalcitrant squatters from Mocha with strong hints that the PPP government is undemocratic.
Isabella DeCaires, in a letter in the newspaper, contemptuously laughed at the clothes the President wore when an Arab delegation visited Guyana. One can add to these samples, the eerie silence of most CMC civil society groups that were unmoved by the five months of election rigging.
At the time of writing, Mike McCormack, permanent president of the Guyana Human Rights Association, takes the position that he has to study Ogunseye’s extremism before he can comment. TUS that write long letters in the newspapers with the habit of attaching dozens of signatures are silent too.
TUS and the CMC and the civil society bodies they control like the GHRA, Transparency Institute- Guyana branch, Policy Forum, Red Thread and other CMC women organisations, including SASOD, which is usually vocal, remained reticent during the five months of election rigging and will remain silent on the Ogunseye outburst.
What Ogunseye said is what the CMC and TUS habour in their hearts, but why come out openly and say it when they can use African politicians to say it for them? There will be more Ogunseyes to come because the CMC and TUS will continue to nurture them.
