The Degenerate in His Labyrinth
By Ruel Johnson
One of my favourite books, although I confess I remember few details of the text, is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ subtle masterpiece, The General in his Labyrinth. The story is a fictional representation of the final days of a decrepit Simon Bolivar, the legendary South American liberator. The reader is taken along on an intimate journey with an impotent, literally and metaphorically, man who watches as everything he built is challenged and undermined, not just by political enemies but people in his own camp.
Watching the overhead view of Bharrat Jagdeo’s high-walled, seaside mansion with those seemingly frivolous looping paths leading away from and then back to the house, it is hard not to conjure the image of some labyrinth inhabited by, as Jagdeo’s recent outbursts have shown, an impotent former political leader striving to make sense of his newly acquired irrelevance and impotence. The PPP has had its hands full of dealing with the manifestations of his attempts at resurgence, seeking to defend it on purely political terms.
The thing is, this isn’t simply about partisan politics – we’ve long transcended that. This is about a vindictive and cowardly man-child who flew far too high too early in his life, an Icarus buoyed by the noxious currents of ethnic division and political dysfunction with no one there to clip his wings. Jagdeo is a petulant boy handed power on a silver platter who used his personal ethnic and class insecurities to construct a machinery of greed and bigotry, one that is already falling apart. In the long view, he is transient and of little consequence.
The true generalissimo, and real subject of this piece, is the Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr. Roger Luncheon, the man who has stood behind the throne in one constant position without fail for the past 22 years, the only true living relic of the ‘liberation’ of this particular South American country.
Roger Luncheon, from a writer’s perspective, is an interesting character, basically an embodiment of internal schizoid contradictions, personal cowardice and grand megalomania. He is essentially a mediocrity but one made eminent because he is a mediocrity situated in a machinery of almost unbridled power that is otherwise staffed by incompetent or brainwashed people.
Luncheon’s role in the establishment and sustenance of the PPP hegemony has been an understated and stealthy one. Like the head house slave, Stephen, in Tarantino’s Django Unchained, Luncheon has been the administrator of the estate of two generations of leaders in a racist machinery. Since 1992 he has seen the rise and fall of political leaders in the PPP, Cheddi, Janet, Ramkarran, Nagamatoo, Jagdeo and even Ramotar and while a few have surpassed him in the transient exercise of power, no one has enjoyed it for such a long time at such a consistently high level.
True, on the death of Cheddi Jagan, his personal ambition was curbed when he was not just passed over but casually dismissed as the PPP’s presidential candidate, a move that would have been truly politically astute, but he made little fuss and continued in his role as Head of the Presidential Secretariat, a post he still functions in today, despite indications of voluntarily leaving, going back as far back as the late 1990s, and various bouts of ill-health. How Luncheon has been crafty is that he also cultivated ties in the political opposition as well. When the scandal broke a few years ago about the PNC’s Mortimer Mingo being offered a house in Pradoville 2, it was revealed that the offer was made through the facilitation of Luncheon himself. About a few months ago I was in a meeting with someone who was at the time being maligned by the Office of the President but who detailed a direct relationship to Luncheon, and when Luncheon recently referred to even David Granger as his friend, he was not exactly being facetious.
Over the past year or so, a former diplomat, Kojo Parris (son of former Burnham-era PNC official, Malcolm Parris), has sought to serve as a sort of quiet personal envoy of the good doctor who Parris claims to be the most brilliant political thinker in Guyana. Parris’ strategy has so far had two stages – firstly, advise against any sustained attack against the PPP on the premise that Luncheon is in the midst of a reform process, and when that failed, suggest that the effect of social media is trivial, particular at those times when it has proven to be most effective against the PPP. At the core of this delusional narrative is that Luncheon means well and at some higher, transcendental level is really acting in the interest of Guyana, ready to rebel against the “crass accumulators” in the PPP, meaning Jagdeo et co.
Not that Parris’ narrative is completely bullshit. Jagdeo has in fact been the major cog in Luncheon’s personal schemes in that while he retained Luncheon and avoided a tussle that might have torn the PPP apart, he also undermined his authority in a way that no PPP leader has been able to do. With the Jagdeo superstructure having been built around him, including a deepening of the sentiment of his ethnicity disqualifying him for the apex of PPP leadership, Luncheon has been reduced to passive-aggressive sabotage. There was, for example, his testimony in the Freddie Kissoon libel case, which did more damage to the [then] President’s reputation than any other aspect of the case. Jagdeo has had three distinct advantages over Luncheon, however – age, good health and wealth. Even with the blowback after the 2011 election, and Jagdeo’s subsequent disappearance from the public eye, all he has had to do is out-wait and outspend an ailing Luncheon, while taking the time to use his contacts in the international community to build a tenuous faÇade of international statesmanship.
With an increasingly frail Luncheon closer to death than he has ever been, the appearance of his daughter, previously unknown to the general public, on the PPP’s platform is really a manifestation of the good doctor’s last hurrah, his most concrete attempt at inserting himself into the future of this polity. He knows that this is his last battle, and that he has failed at whatever convoluted legacy he has sought to establish. Parris, the diplomatic envoy has also primarily failed in his ill-informed mission and the Coalition, despite some campaign inefficiencies, is gaining momentum in its bid to oust a disjointed, bumbling, and increasingly desperate PPP.
Which leads us to the situation we are in today. One gets the sense that Luncheon has given up and is content to sabotage the PPP, now firmly under Jagdeo’s control, one last time. The reality is that attacking the army is a losing strategy for any commander-in-chief, yet it was Luncheon who led the charge, after which the entire PPP began to follow suit including both Donald Ramotar and Bharrat Jagdeo, prompting not agreement but a principled backlash from former military personnel, including former Chief-of-Staff Gary Best who gained prominence under Jagdeo. Perhaps the greatest clue to Luncheon’s passive aggressive undermining of the PPP is hidden in a speech he made in a primarily opposition stronghold, South Ruimveldt, two days ago:
“And you know we are going to be confronted with the excesses of those who know their days are limited, those who realize that they cannot continue to be fooling everyone…”
There may come a day when some exceedingly patient political science or psychology student (or perhaps Parris himself) is going to wade through the verbose pronouncements, diverse dictates and declassified minutes of cabinet meetings to trace the blueprint of Dr. Luncheon’s opus, and some intimate and redemptive portrait of the man may yet emerge.
All that shit is just speculative. The reality is that in three weeks, the People’s Progressive Party will lose these elections, and with that loss the labyrinthine edifice that has been the grand architecture of Dr. Roger Forbes Luncheon will come crumbling down. For all his ambitious schemes, for all his designs, the reality is that all history will remember him as is a bitter, half-senile old man, fading into obscurity, hobbling around with a walker, crippled by age, illness and the loss of indecent power, a degenerate former political general lost in a labyrinth of his own creation.
