Reepu Daman Persaud should be disciplined – AFC

“If it was anybody else making such an obviously out-of-line Party statement, he or she would already been hauled up for disciplinary proceedings by the General Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party.”
This is according to Alliance for Change, Khemraj Ramjattan, who was responding to comments by PPP stalwart, Reepu Daman Persaud, who at the end of the Diwali Motorcade at the LBI Ground last week Saturday, said that President Bharrat Jagdeo should be granted a third term.
According to Ramjattan, his current understanding from the General Secretary of the party, Donald Ramotar, is that the position of the Executive and Central Committee of the PPP is clear that there will be no third term for Jagdeo.
“This was told to me by no one other than Donald Ramotar himself.”
Ramjattan also suggested that others in the leadership of the PPP have also expressed the same sentiments.
“He (Ramotar) mentioned to me that the AFC was being mischievous when the AFC recently alerted the nation about attempts afoot to change the constitution to allow a third term for Jagdeo.”
Ramjattan reported that Ramotar stated very emphatically that the position of the entire leadership of the Party was that there will be no third term.
“Today we see flyers and buttons in nice packages being sent around lobbying for a Jagdeo third term and Reepu Daman Persaud’s announcement at a major Hindu event.”
Ramjattan posited that Ramotar must now investigate whether Pandit Reepu Daman Persaud is behind the circulation of the flyers and buttons and/or whether he is the intellectual author of the campaign.
He said that the Pandit’s public pronouncement is incriminatory of him being the mischief maker. “The fact of his utterance can be used to draw that inference. In any event his public pronouncement alone ought to be reason enough for an internal investigation on the charge that he made a comment detrimental to the best interests of the Party.”
According to Ramjattan, he is a long time sufferer of those charges. “I remember when I had publicly not supported the extension of Laurie Lewis as Commissioner some time in 1994, when there was no official Party position on the matter, I was hauled over the coals by then appointed Investigation Committee of Dr Roger Luncheon Luncheon, Harripersaud Nokta, and you bet, Reepu Daman Persaud.”
Ramjattan said that he was asked to shut up on the issue or suffer serious consequences. “My statement already out in the public domain, I then went on to give trouble on other issues for which I was a decade later expelled.”
Ramjattan, a former leading member of the PPP, hardly missed an opportunity to either write or speak out against, as he puts it, the detrimental activities of his Party leaders prior to his expulsion from the PPP in 2004.
He is well known for having in 1994 master-minded, with support from others, the removal of “Communism and Marxism/Leninism” from the PPP youth section’s constitution at the Enterprise Congress and replacing them with “democracy”.
However, his attempts at changing in similar terms this ideological course at the level at the PPP’s constitution failed miserably in 2002 when party hardcore and ideological diehards like Janet Jagan, Ramotar, Moses Nagamootoo, Rohee, Nokta, Clinton Collymore and even Jagdeo led an onslaught against him that his proposal had to fail.
Ramjattan is now Chairman of the AFC, the party he co-founded with Raphael Trotman and Sheila Holder in 2005.