Please note these 46 words of Moses Nagamootoo

LAST Friday, Moses Nagamootoo officially launched his memoir, “Dear Land of Guyana” at the Pegasus. Nagamootoo’s book is replete with omissions that run into the thousands that have left a gaping aperture in Guyana’s historiography that he compulsorily has to fill if he is ever going to redeem himself.

Please see my two negative critiques of his memoir – Tuesday, March 26, 2024, “Book review: Nagamootoo’s comical tragedy,” and Thursday, March 27, 2024, “Nagamootoo’s Faustian journey and Mephistophelean rendezvous.”

After reading what Nagamootoo is reported in the media as saying at the launch, I say unapologetically that Moses should seek counselling. He told his audience that his book is about his journey of contribution to the quest for political and social cohesion in Guyana. But the contents of his book contradict that, so this is why I talk about counselling.

How can you launch your memoir about your attempts to bring reconciliation to Guyana yet when you were in power for five years, your administration exacerbated the divisions in Guyana and your own individual performance in government allowed for the expansion of the divisions?

Here is Nagamootoo in his words on page xi of the preface of his autobiography: “The coalition cannot absolve itself from blame for its removal from office. The complex but toxic mix of inter-party bickering, dependence on ethnic support, entrenchment of the impulse to rig elections, misuse of office to foist personality politics and party paramountcy, cannot be underestimated.”

These are the words of the said man who got up last Friday night at the Pegasus and spoke his life long quest to erase political and ethnic polarization in Guyana.

Those 46 words above were never elongated on in the memoir. When you read those 46 words as you are moving through the pages, you know that all phone calls will go unanswered, dinner or lunch will have to wait and you aren’t putting down the book to go out until those meaty, teasing, titillating, tantalising dramas are described by Nagamootoo. But there is none of that in the book.

How can someone like Nagamootoo, with over 50 years in politics before he became the Prime Minister, tell a gathering of people who came together to buy his book, he has striven all his life for unity in his country, yet the very book they have in their hands contradicts what he opened his mouth and said to them?

If the people who gathered that evening at Pegasus didn’t read my two reviews of the book and were hoping to digest the juicy stories on inter-party fighting between 2015 and 2020 then they must be angry with Nagamootoo by now.
Here is a man who fought party paramountcy all his life with this columnist being part of that long journey, and he was the strategic player in 2015 that made the APNU+AFC coalition achieve power only to see party paramountcy return.

And what did he do about it? There is no explanation or description in his autobiography of what he did. One has to conclude that he did nothing because the organisation that is tied to the paramountcy doctrine wanted him to be Prime Minister again after 2020 and not Ramjattan.

When he wrote his book, one wonders if Nagamootoo was aware of what co-founder of the Alliance For Change, Raphael Trotman, wrote in a letter in the Stabroek News of December 2, 2020.

I quote: “We are a people comprising several nations living in a geographic space we call Guyana… at any given time one or two of those nations will not like another, accept another or give the other the legitimacy it needs. The PNC discovered this from 1966 to 1992 and 2015 to 2020. The PPP discovered this from 1992 to 2015.”

For more on what Trotman had to say about the failure of the AFC in office to dilute racial suspicions, see my column of Monday, December 14, 2020 with the title, “The sickening admission/confession of Raphael Trotman.”

Here are the promotional words of Nagamootoo’s memoir on the back cover: “The formation of a multi-ethnic, six party electoral alliance and its election in 2015 as the first ever broad-based coalition government in Guyana, were giant steps in the right direction towards promoting national unity. It was worth the try to heal our divided nation.”

Moses Nagamootoo owes it to his country to tell us why the giant steps became footprints in the sand that the waves washed away. Those 46 words in his book on the explanation is an insult to this nation. Here is the poem that best describes the political career of Moses Nagamootoo:
“But man, proud man
Dressed in brief authority
Most ignorant of what he is most assured.”