Mr. Ramotar is the twin of Bharrat Jagdeo

I have been immersed in political activism, human rights crusades and public intellectualism since a teenager. From then to now I have no regrets, though I would have preferred not to have gone through all the bad things that have happened to me since my teen days right up to the present. I mean who enjoys being victimized and physical attacks on their person?
But I have been lucky and I mean damn lucky. I never had a public sector job which allowed any past president and the present one to give me orders. Imagine if I were a police officer and had to endure the nonsense and hypocrisy of a President Jagdeo or President Ramotar speaking to me face to face. You have to feel profound sympathy for the people that Jagdeo commanded and that Ramotar now controls.
You just have to feel sorry for police, soldiers, public servants and other categories of employees that the President has direct legal authority over. You just had to feel for these people under Mr. Jagdeo.  How did they cope, when someone as poor in quality and substance as Jagdeo gave them orders?

Mr. Jagdeo returned from New York and met protest action by air traffic controllers. To their face, Mr. Jagdeo told them that if they had picketed him at the airport when he came out, he would have dismissed them. Mr. Jagdeo once addressed a general meeting of the staff of the Environmental Protection Agency and spoke down to the seniors in front of their subordinates. It was a plain case of humiliation.
Mr. Jagdeo summoned engineer Joseph O’Lall and dressed him down in front of others. When PM Hinds rose to speak, he was told to sit. That meeting ended in O’Lall’s dismissal from the Energy Authority. I knew O’Lall from my student days at UG and it was crazy to think that such an educated man could end up being shouted down by Jagdeo.
There is bound to be deep anguish and raging anger in educated men and women who served their county dedicatedly and find themselves in front of a country’s leader who lacked all the qualities of leadership and intellectual finesse. And they have to listen to his inanities, vapidities, banalities, stupidities.

When that happens you just have to feel sympathy for these people.
When I look back at Jagdeo’s hegemony, I thank my stars that life did not put me in the position of these public sector employees. Of course during Mr. Jagdeo’s reign, I was a public sector employee at UG. But let me end with Mr. Jagdeo at this point before readers accuse me of showing off and silly chauvinism.

Not for a fleeting moment would President Jagdeo have entertained the thought of summoning UG lecturers to meet him and I was required to go.
Anyway, let’s go to President Donald Ramotar or as this newspaper’s satirical piece ‘Dem Boys Seh’ refers to him, ‘De Donald.’ ‘De Donald’ told the police force conference that an integrity test will be introduced. Read that to mean, lie detector test. Ramotar is following in the hypocritical footsteps of his benefactor, Bharrat Jagdeo. Put yourself in those officers’ place. It was the circus of Bharrat Jagdeo that they had to watch. Last week there was a reenactment, only this time, Jagdeo was replaced with Ramotar.
All kinds of public sector employees had to endure the polygraph under the Jagdeo presidency but Jagdeo was not brave, creative and accountable to assign the test to himself and his Cabinet. He couldn’t do it because the consequences would have swept him from power. The cowardly tradition is being continued by Ramotar.

Employees of the Energy Authority were forced to take the polygraph recently and many were dismissed.
Ramotar should administer the test to himself, his Cabinet and the Jagdeoite school he inherited from his benefactor. The list includes the big boys at NICIL, Guysuco, NCN, his presidential advisors and Dr. Luncheon among others.

Here is a president that is sitting on an anti-corruption report on NCN and just would not act on it. I point readers to one of the most trenchant dismissals of Ramotar as president by the Stabroek News on this locked away report (see the paper’s editorial on the issue).
This same man has the temerity to tell police officers that they must take an integrity test. A Freudian ghost stalks Donald Ramotar. Look the word he chose to use, “integrity,” something the PPP leaders never had since the fifties.

I am a lucky man – Jagdeo and Ramotar were never my bosses and could never have been. Pity those that have to take their orders.