WHEN I was young, I really liked Michael Caine. The only movie star I liked more than Caine was Rajesh Khanna. This was not because Caine was married to a Guyanese woman but because he was a niche. One of my favourite Caine movies is “X, Y and Z.”
Over the years, I never knew why I liked that movie because it was a box office failure and there was nothing spectacular about the plot. In fact, the acting of Caine and Elizabeth Taylor made the movie worthwhile looking at. One day, decades ago, I knew why I stuck with the film.
The answer was the theme song that played at the end of the movie while the credits were rolling. It was done by a soft rock group I liked when I was just sixteen, named “Three Dog Night.” The song is titled “Going in Circles,” and is an instructive, philosophical story of people looking for that dream that they once had but threw away.

When I read yesterday (Friday) that Ramjattan had given up on the leader position of the Alliance For Change I thought of “Going in Circles.” Sadly, this man who was presented with an incredibly phenomenal opportunity to write his name prodigiously on the face of Guyanese history will now ride out ignominiously into the sunset.

Ramjattan and I shared a close friendship that disappeared after 2015 as when the tide washes away the sand. The last conversation I ever had with Ramjattan was in 2017 in his office when he was Minister of Public Security. I have never seen him since then. I have never spoken to him since then even by phone. It was a tsunamic verbal downpour from me. It is a conversation I will never forget.
I will always remember his silly response when I told him that he has become a minister and has forgotten about his friends. He apologised and said his job is a busy one so he never thought of me. He lied and I told him so. I told him, I am in his face and the faces of this country every day because each day the president and every Cabinet minister go to the newspaper before even drinking their coffee.

I told him it was impossible to forget me because he sees me and my critical headlines of the APNU+AFC government every day of every week of every month of every year in the Kaieteur News.
I knew he wasn’t truthful because in a television interview with Christopher Ram in the same year of 2017, Ram had raised a critical article of mine against the APNU+AFC government and Ramjattan shot back at me telling Ram it looked like I wanted to bring back the PPP in government.
Long after, our conversation in 2017 in his office, he told London-based PNC member, Norman Brown that I disliked him after 2015 because I wanted to go back and teach at UG and he couldn’t do anything about it because he wasn’t the Minister of Education.
It was that kind of betrayal of history, that kind of refusal to learn from the past that led to the legitimate and legal electoral defeat of Ramjattan.

When I left Ramjattan’s office that day, I knew full well that our friendship had died. I left his office with a tinge of sadness because I know as an educated person who studied history that power intoxication is the nemesis of those who insult the lessons of history and the values of the past.
The Khemraj Ramjattan that I knew as a very close friend was not the Khemraj I knew for decades. Power had mentally corrupted Ramjattan and that would lead to the inevitable crash going the wrong way on a one-way street. In the post-colonial history of the Third World, few people had the envious gift handed to them by history to change their country the way that gift was handed to Moses Nagamootoo and Khemraj Ramjattan.

Guyanese never gravitated to a third party after the United Force died in 1968. The Guyanese people handed Ramjattan the keys to history in 2015. He threw it away on the altar of power and that power devoured Ramjattan. Both he and Nagamootoo have ridden out into the sunset with their faces looking down to the earth in complete mental disharmony. I leave some lines of the song, going in Circles, for Ramjattan to digest.
I’ve been through a million trips in the night
Living with shadows, looking for light
And passing the faces, how lonely they seem
Looking for traces of yesterday’s dream
Going in circles, been here before
Never expected anything more
Might die tomorrow, I might go to Spain
Dumb to the sorrow, numb to the pain