…and Mislabelling
The author Thomas Wolff’s most famous novel is “You can’t go home again”. In it he scathingly details the lives of his hometown folks. He originally had another name for it, but after a friend read the manuscript and told him he’ll never be able to return home, he changed the title.
In his weekly Chronicle column – the sum of his endeavours for G$20 million annually with perks! – Moses Nagamootoo complains that one of his erstwhile comrades in the PPP, and a Berbician to boot, told him he can’t go back to his home village of Whim.
With typical tone-deafness – incredible in a man with literary pretentions! – Nagamootoo retorted that he’ll be attending a “mini-rally” in Whim. But that’s not the point, is it? Even he’s conceding his unpopularity by prefacing his homecoming “rally” as “MINI”!! His actions since 2015 have made his name worse that “mud” in Whim, as well as the whole of Berbice!
To “go back home” is to return to folks who embrace you as one of their own. After throwing four thousand Berbician sugar workers into the streets, can the folks of Whim ever embrace him as “one of their own”? “Neemakaram” – or “ungrateful” — is more like it!! Isn’t it pathetic that his sister, Mousie and Poowah are half of the Whim AFC’s list?
Once again, your Eyewitness is going to make his prediction on the LGE: THE AFC IS GOING TO BE WIPED OUT. And they’ll be going out not with a bang, but a whimper! If they have 100 persons at their “mini” rally – three-quarters of them AFC paid hirelings – that’ll be plenty. The march from “Tara Shop to Anguya’s Turn” will be more like a funeral procession to bury the “dead meat” that is now the AFC!
Nagamootoo painstakingly lists a number of Indian politicians who tried to poach votes from the PPP and failed – starting with Balram Singh Rai. It has to be a Freudian slip acknowledging his imminent membership in that list, after the LGE today!!
Nagamootoo hypocritically cants that people at the LGE should be voting for improvement in their local conditions, and “not for party or ethnic group”. So why did the AFC run as a party, and not as independent candidates? And why’d he say the “contest is between the PPP and AFC”?
He also refers once again to his father in reference to the 1937 song “thoroughbreds don’t cry – they run and die”, from the kids’ movie by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. Nagamootoo implies every time that he’s a thoroughbred!! But that’s a reeeal stretch, since these noble steeds are noted for agility, speed, and spirit.
Qualities conspicuously absent in Nagamootoo!!
…Democracy
One of the qualities that both the AFC and PNC exemplify – and made Granger assert they were “as one” in the coalition – is their propensity to “talk the talk”, but never “walk the walk” on good governance! In his only act of participation in the LGE for the AFC, leader Raphael Trotman quoted a foreign newspaper to encourage Guyanese to go out and vote today: “The best way to protect democracy is to practise it.”
One would wish he and his comrades would blow up that statement and place it prominently on their air-conditioned office walls!! Were they practising democracy when they gerrymandered the constituencies? Were they practising democracy when they encouraged David Granger to unilaterally select the Chairman of GECOM by jettisoning the consensual law and tradition that had been introduced in 1992?
But they’ve been caught in their own BS. Nagamootoo never got the PM’s powers he was promised in the Cummingsburg Accord; Ramjattan has been circumvented in Security; and Trotman became the fall guy in oil!!
Oh, what a tangled web we weave…!!
…The meaning of integrity
For two decades, the PNC MPs didn’t file their assets with the Integrity Commission, as demanded by the law. Said they didn’t recognise the Commission established by the PPP.
What’s the excuse of FIFTEEN of their Ministers now?