Elisabeth Harper is an unmitigated hypocrite
No one like Elisabeth Harper has the right to become the Prime Minister of Guyana. Our elected officials must be people of such standards that their values not only preserve the essential fulcrums on which rest the civilization of the country, but such standards are preserved in the present generation that take them into the future. Elisabeth Harper, the so-called saving face of the PPP’s twenty-three-year-old bankrupt bandwagon, has made the topic of domestic abuse one of her election platform subjects. There are two repellant aspects of Mrs. Harper’s fiery hypocrisy. One is that she enunciated a denunciation of domestic abuse while sitting next to a former president who abused his wife. Secondly, she barefacedly avoided the concatenation of horrific treatment documented by the common-law wife of Mr. Jagdeo. And the documentation should have caused the public humiliation of Jagdeo with the ignominious fall from power. That Jagdeo remained in office after his mistreatment demonstrated the descent into moral miasma that has canopied this country since 1999 and has gone on unabated. In this context we can cite the incident at a party where President Ramotar back-balled with a lady of the night from Leopold Street who Ramotar ordered drinks for only to discover that she was a gate-crasher and was later evicted by management. By then the damage was done –the back-balling photo went viral on the internet. And it was a terrible image for which most wives would have hit the roof. Mrs. Ramotar, interviewed by INews, said she saw nothing wrong with the President’s action. Back to another back-balling president, Mr. Jagdeo (who was publicly photographed by the media back-balling on two occasions – at a GDF Old Year’s Night party and with a male Chronicle journalist at the Lusignan 2011 PPP election rally). There isn’t one official word of rejection from Mr. Jagdeo to date on the mountainous allegations of abuse by his common-law wife, Varshnie. Why then should one dismiss the accusations which include the eviction from the marital bedroom one week after the Hindu wedding? Her sleeping quarters were on the sofa in the living room where she contended the mosquitoes became a problem. There were the refusal of President Jagdeo to assign her a vehicle and Mr. Jagdeo’s intervention to prevent a contractor from lending her a car. Here are the words of Ms. Singh; “He decided that to punish me he would withhold all resources, financial and otherwise and line my path with a multitude of cruel, selfish obstacles.” Here is a heart-breaking section of Ms. Singh’s condemnation of Jagdeo; “I have been begging our President for financial assistance so I can live, for the past ten years and have not received it. I have had to depend on my parents who are pensioners and my family to support me. It is shameful at this stage of my life to regress to having my parents support me. For two years (2003-2004) I was denied access to the Presidential apartment at State House. If I was not home by 6pm the apartment door would be locked with the latch from the inside so my key could not open it. Even if I was home at 6pm I would be in my room by myself, where all I could do was read and listen to music. We were two people living separately under one roof. When I was locked out, I would have to spend the night on a sofa on the first floor, without a sheet, get murdered by mosquitoes, praying for the night to pass quickly so I could get into my room, bathe and get to office, or to my public engagements etc. I got no sleep at all during the period I was locked out. Eventually I would walk with a change of clothes, just in case and then go to my Aunt’s house nearby to bathe the next morning.” Is this the man Elisabeth Harper is happy to lead her party’s campaign for the 2015 election? But more importantly, does Harper see anything immoral or depraved or uncivilized in what Varshnie Singh has accused Bharrat Jagdeo of? If Mrs. Harper cannot bring herself to offer to least a terse condemnatory comment on the traumas that Ms. Singh suffered not by a labourer or a cane-cutter or a mango-seller but by the President of the country, then she is an abominable hypocrite unfit for the prime ministerial slot in this country. And should she continue on the campaign trail, she should spare the nation her inflammatory hypocrisy by avoiding the subject of domestic violence. She’s not fit to comment on it.
