Bharrat J – another try to redeem a brother
Feb 16, 2025
By GHK Lall
Kaieteur News- Guyanese are watching a man destroy himself in slow motion. Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo is his name, and self-destruction is his game. He thinks it is his claim to fame. Being who I am, it is painful to watch a man overreach so many times, fall overboard so often. I cannot stand idly by, face my peers, stand before my Maker, and say that I did my best to redeem him. To save him from himself, his worst instincts. Hence, I must try again.
Every now and again, I am given a clip (a clip only) of one of Dr. Jagdeo’s Thursday afternoon riotous bacchanals. He calls them press conferences. All I see and hear is a man who has boobytrapped himself with high octane verbal explosives. He unloads, he implodes, he explodes. I find myself doubting, actually despairing, that this man who is a former head of state, could have an elevated conversation again. On Thursdays, he meanders around the potholed roads of Guyana, and it is all to no avail. He succeeds in creating a bigger tomb for himself. I observe a man, a leader, a political figure, who may travel every road that there is, but still is unable to discover the frontiers of his soul. Indeed, its logo is so immaterial, so elusive, if I may be permitted to delve into the Jungian. Where there is no logo, there is no Tao. And, in its highest formulation and expression, no Tao means no truth. What I’ve seen on display is the pathos of a man now confined to the loopy, the droopy, and the weepy. It is said that some people die with their music in them. I say that Jagdeo lives with no music in him.
He is too desperate, and it oozes out of his pores. Tell the Guyanese people a clear and straight story about the management and the truths of their oil patrimony. There wouldn’t be need for all the defensive antics, that not even the worst aggressiveness, do anything to lessen where his management labors have gone wrong, proven suspect. Raucous harangues and mental collapses merely highlight the tattered state in which Guyana’s chief oil master now finds himself. When he dives into the world of the fantasist, it was inevitable that oil facts and oil circumstances would be severely devalued. He wanted to be on top of the oil, and like Midas with his daughter, this black gold out from under the seabed has become his mausoleum. Today, Mr. Jagdeo’s weekly press whimpers reduce him to the level of a mental midget. No amount of oil is worth paying such a huge price. No lusting after power, panting to hold on to it, can compensate for the damage to standing, to the respect due, but now forever vanquished by a man who is past caring.
When press entanglements (they have lost the luster of press brawls, so comedic they are) deteriorate to an opportunity to sock it to the PNC, and other perceived opponents, political or otherwise, then something more is beheld, cannot be denied. When Jagdeo, the once and future political genius, gallops out of his press box to batter the PNC, what I detect is a cheap political schemer. One slyly appealing to still cheaper tribalism as his answer to real questions, and real problems that are of a national nature. When my brother Bharrat becomes a dragline dredging up the detritus of decades ago, and the recent ones of a half-decade just past, then all he does is play to raw prejudices. He’s leverage those for his own benefit alone. When he locks himself in the past, he surrenders the key to the present, all but gives up on the future that is the kind of birthright due to every citizen of this Republic.
(Bharrat J – another try to redeem a brother)
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