I HAVE always regarded myself as a working class boy. The term “working class human” cannot be measured in tangible ways and by actual class status. By economic measurement, you could place a person in a class category. What you cannot use is psychic feeling.

The term “working class boy” connotes a certain psychic way of looking at your personal life. Perhaps no better way of putting it is who you socialise with. After you leave your professorial duties or your white collar job when the day is done, who do you socialise with? I think the term “working class boy” can only be justified by your socialisation process.

If you cannot find meaning in the friendship of ordinary people, then, as a middle class intellectual or petty bourgeois left-winger who came from proletarian origins and wants to be classified as remaining firm in your working class background, you would be deceiving yourself at a dangerous psychological level.

It is this context, my words on Roger Luncheon will be purely positive. I got to know Roger very closely in the pre-1992 era before he became perhaps the second most important decision-maker in the 1992 government of Dr. Cheddi Jagan. One of the dimensions of our friendship was my visits to him at the Georgetown Hospital with people who needed medical assistance.
I even took people to his house. I could remember vividly, I was swimming on the Kitty beach with my friend who lived on Barr Street Campbellville and he got bitten by several jelly fish that we in Guyana refer to as “Portuguese manawar.” I think that was the last time I was at his home. Shortly after, he became part of the government.

I have been a columnist for 35 years in which I have produced literally thousands and thousands of columns, and in that ocean you cannot find a column critical of Roger.
I think the reason for that was because Roger was essentially a very simple man who was incapable of living a life outside the trappings of ordinariness. That is a trait I deeply admire in people though they have status, wealth and power.

The world does not see many of such type, but once I came out of poverty, I wanted to be like that and I am satisfied I am like that.
Our friendship ebbed after he became head of the presidential secretariat because that was a more taxing job than a minister’s and time does not allow such busy people to return to idyllic times that belonged to the past.

As an anarchist, I tend to keep away from power. That has been my relationship with power my entire life. So after 1992, I didn’t see or talk to Roger Luncheon.
Our only encounter came in 1999 when I took up an appointment as a media consultant to Information Minister, Moses Nagamootoo. Roger drafted a one-year contract on generous terms but on receiving it, I made contact with him to shorten it by half.

Giving my reservation with power and my status as a daily newspaper columnist, I thought a shorter period would gel with my temperament. He had an inimitable way of talking to people in his capacity as a high state official.

You have to see that style to comprehend its outline. No words can adequately capture a true description.
He told me that he doesn’t think a consultant to a minister is given a six-month contract and why I don’t want to be with Moses for a year. But he changed it soon after our discussion and I don’t think he was capable of refusing such a request. He was simply just a cool dude.

He will go down in Guyanese history as one of the simplest power-holders this country has produced. He was the quintessential working class boy in the corridors of power.
I suspect he wanted to emulate what he saw in Cheddi and Janet Jagan. Both of the Jagans lived ordinary lives and eschewed ostentatious living. Despite being people with status and power, both of the Jagans socialised at an extensive level with the ordinary folks.
I will leave readers with one of the recurring motifs in our conversations before we lost contact with each other after 1992. The PPP lived inside his veins. He was obsessed with the wrongs done to the PPP throughout history.

He told me if the PPP wins the 1992 elections, he would turn the lower flat of his Stanley Place home in Kitty into an office for the youth arm of the PPP – the PYO. I think he was one of the simplest humans that high politics produced in this world. His style should be emulated.