As UG goes, so does the rest of the society

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As UG goes, so does the rest of the society
Kaieteur News, 19 August 2007

Dear Editor,

This will be the third time that the President of Guyana, Mr. Bharrat
Jagdeo, has dictatorially imposed on the University of Guyana the very
same Vice-Chancellor (VC), Dr. James Rose, who is a very public PPP
supporter and campaigner for the President and the PPP.

The recurring results are that the University of Guyana gets further
and further degraded with each dictatorial imposition of the President.
The additional outcomes are that each imposition coincides with the
decline and dismantling of the very little remaining fundamental
building blocks (free press, independent judiciary, independent board
of governors of universities) of a democratic society.

When Professor Joshua Ramsammy was ousted by a PPP manoeuvre in the
first dictatorial imposition at UG, most of us quietly moaned the loss
of a person, not only with impeccable scientific knowledge and wisdom,
but one who has dedicated his life to fighting the injustices and
tyrannies of dictatorial regimes.

The wider society stood silent at the mistreatment of this dedicated
Guyanese by President Jagdeo and his PPP cronies.

The PPP and President Jagdeo took this as a sign that they can, and
will, be able to get away with anything they so please. They think they
have the power to do whatever they want, with no legal recourse by the
local citizenry and opponents.

With their own VC in place, President Jagdeo and the PPP manipulated
the university at will, e.g. taking away funds that were
budgeted/allocated for the operation of the University. The UG
Administration even started to usurp students' funds paid expressly to
improve their work/lab environments, but now directed into the general
finances of the University.

They went about cutting and recalling the miniscule funds that were
being competed for by university professors for research projects (the
funds could not buy the simplest of instrumentation). Again, a few of
us (Mr. F. Kissoon, Dr. Beharry, and I) wrote to make it known that
these dictatorial impositions and authoritarian culture at the
University of Guyana mean that further underdevelopment will occur.
Worse, it sets the stage for the implementation of a dictatorial type
culture into the wider society, since independent and dissident voices
can now be easily silenced.

This was then followed with the second Presidential dictatorial
imposition of the same PPP VC, followed with the same warning to the
University community and the general society, i.e., dissent will not be
tolerated and/or do so at your peril.

The PNC, forever preoccupied with the race-card game, could not see the
wider tactics/strategies of President Jagdeo and his PPP cronies. The
PNC went right ahead and played into their hands by agreeing with the
selection of an “Afro-Guyanese,” thereby showing an equal bankruptcy of
sound judgment and ethics/morals. This is also a betrayal of the
Guyanese public, since these impositions were not in the best interests
of the nation.

The dismantling of the democratic structures and the establishment of
dictatorial structures have progressed a couple of steps further.

The Recall Bill, which was pushed and approved in Parliament (by the
PPP and PNC), is designed to remove the freedom of a politician to
express his/her free will and to keep the members of their respective
parties in line. An individual's conscience and the will of the
electorate are no longer valid. What is important is the will of the
dominant PPP and/or PNC. The ‘Paramountcy of the Party' doctrine has
returned.

The Forestry Bill, which basically removes the ability to get any
access to information on the deals that are currently going on in the
forestry sector, makes the acquisition of such information illegal and
subject to prosecution by law enforcement agencies. This also in effect
kills the ‘Freedom of Information' legislation (Now being piloted in
Parliament by Mr. R. Trotman, MP) dead in its tracks.

Government advertisements were used to gain control of nearly all the
newspapers in the country by President Jagdeo and his PPP accomplices.

The Government controls radio and has been putting off for years the
granting of radio licences to others.

The recent fiddling and changing of the Constitution of Guyana now
gives the President of Guyana control of the Judiciary. This marks the
decline of the independence of the Judiciary in Guyana as one of the
fundamental building blocks of a democracy.

We now basically have a President with a majority in Parliament, and a
Judiciary aligned to and controlled by him. Now no one can legally
contest any of his dictatorial moves.

It therefore comes as no surprise that we are going to have a third
dictatorial imposition of the VC, Dr James Rose, on the University of
Guyana .

The dictatorial impositions will continue until the Guyanese society
has no semblance of being a democratic society. The PPP supporters will
find all sorts of reasons, also, to support the President's
implementations. We are into similar governance as Cuba (Castro),
Russia (Putin) and Guyana under the rule of President Forbes Burnham.

We are watching our freedoms being curtailed, the independent
institutions compromised, and our human and natural resources
squandered. When will the PPP and its supporters wake up to the fact
that they are willing accomplices to the imposition of a dictatorship
on the Guyanese society?

The question is how long will this continue before the whole society
implodes?

Anand Daljeet