The Freudian ghost in Moses Nagamootoo’s mind
This is what Moses Nagamootoo wrote recently; “This village (Whim)… has long been a PPP stronghold. It is unlikely that this could change any time soon. But what will never change is that my navel string is buried in this area– in Whim. So in spite of political outcomes at the polls, I will always render whatever assistance my villagers need. They wanted street lights and road lamps. They got them.
This is an incomprehensible statement. It is also an assertion of determinism in politics that does not exist (I guess only for Nagamootoo). A village or city or in a federal system like India or the US, a state has no deterministic, political loyalty that cannot be surmounted. Ethnic loyalty is a different matter.
But even in this realm there is no permanency of embrace because a rival ethnic party can dislodge its traditional rival as we see in places like India and Israel. If Nagamootoo examines where Obama won in 2008, he would see that Obama took states that voted solidly for Republican politicians since the sixties.
Nagamootoo’s conceptualization of Whim makes no sense and is almost foolish in the light of the results of the 2011 general elections. He took Whim from the PPP. What Nagamootoo has done by making the observation that Whim will remain a PPP outpost for a long time to come is to obfuscate his failure as a politician for which he has destroyed any potential for the birth of a legacy. It was a Freudian admission that he failed the expectations both history and Guyana.
Ironically, the rise to power of Moses Nagamootoo has destroyed his lifelong work in Guyana. He lost Whim in 2015 in general elections, lost it again in LGE in 2016 and will lose it again in LGE in 2018. He will further lose it in the national poll of 2020. Why did he win it in 2011 and subsequently lost all other contests?
The general factor analysts will cite East Indian rejection of the AFC merger with the PNC. They saw APNU as the PNC. The 2015 PPP defeat was so razor thin that such an argument is essentially valid. The AFC managed to secure the ballots of a small percentage of disgruntled East Indians who wanted to see the back of the PPP. But even that small number never anticipated the AFC’s repugnant exercise of state power after 2015.
Herein lies the reason for Whim’s (and by extension all of Guyana) rejection of Nagamootoo. The coalition was now a fact. There was nothing AFC constituencies could have done after 2015 but hope for the best. But not even a tiny part of the best came. Nagamootoo should be ashamed of himself in his contempt for the Whim folks. They are not stupid people.
They read like all other Guyanese wherever they are. They know their son became the Prime Minister and has no power. They know who the people with real power are. They read what the newspapers and the analysts say about Nagamootoo’s lack of power. They read about Nagamootoo’s own party, the AFC, wanting to trim the large jurisdictions of Minister Harmon. They know about the AFC wanting to renegotiate the Cummingsburg Accord. The know about the scandal at the Chronicle where two iconic Guyanese who are Moses’s friends since the seventies were stopped from writing in the Chronicle
The reason why Whim is a PPP stronghold in 2018 is not because of determinism in politics or the fantastical magic of the PPP that Nagamootoo thinks exists. The PPP lost Whim in 2011. The PPP lost power since 2015. Whim’s son, Moses is the Prime Minister. So why is Whim still a PPP conquest and according to Nagamootoo will remain like that for a long time? It is a question that Nagamootoo must honestly debate will Guyanese political observers.
Nagamootoo, in expanding on Whim’s loyalty to the PPP, made a strange (a harsher word could be stupid) observation. He wrote; “They wanted street lights and road lamps. They got them.” So if they got these things from their son why are they still clinging to the party that is in opposition?
This runs against the essence of political theory. A party is in opposition but still controls a village where the Prime Minister was born and ethnic difference does not come into play since the PPP is Indian and Moses is Indian too. Is it not the party in power that has the resources to share out the goodies while the opposition has nothing to offer? That is political theory. Moses has turned such theory on its head.