By Kojo M. Parris
Hi Chief,
Trust you are well and continuing to thrive. Apologies for taking over a month off to respect the passing of patriot Cde Corbin and uBaba Eusi, King Charles’ visit, and the excitement surrounding your continued harassment of the Mohameds. The hiatus also enabled me to process the feedback from your ministerial colleagues and sections of the urban Indian communities, the principal target audiences for my previous two pieces, ‘https://kiskadeewatch.com/opinion/guest-columns/the-courage-to-become-unnecessary/ and https://kiskadeewatch.com/opinion/guest-columns/from-manufacturing-consent-to-manufacturing-discontent/.
Some assumed that I am about to launch a political party. Alas, no. But because I have lived in countries that slid into avoidable lawlessness – Zimbabwe, South Sudan etc – I recognise how close Guyana is to the precipice and feel a patriotic responsibility to be very vocal. And you sit, spreadeagled at the center of the miasma. By the time the streets become lawless, the State has long been so and citizens stop expecting anything to change. Guyanese have never seen where that road ends. I have, and I would rather be thought disloyal to our long friendship than remain silent now.
Let me be clear: my concern is not with any political party, not yours, not the PNC’s, and not WIN (thankfully the AFC is long useless). It is that Guyanese, and your party, must ensure that you leave our political landscape without delay, given the price both are being made to pay by your continued presence.
In the space of a month, Guyana has lost too many good men. Corbin and uBaba, between them, embody much of what I have been trying to say to you since May 2020. One led the PNC for a decade and then handed it on, on his own terms. What he left behind was a party free to renew itself. It did so and won the next elections. He had the foresight to recognise what he had become, and bowing out was his final service to his party and, ultimately, to our democracy.
Eusi Kwayana sat in Guyana’s first elected Cabinet at 28, younger than you were when you assumed the presidency. He retained the moral standing to speak truth to all and sundry. The nation, the region and the progressive world will celebrate Baba Eusi indefinitely, even as they mourn none of his contemporaries who held power. He died at 101 with no title to his name, except a legacy that will remain standing long after the bridge you named for yourself has become a heap of rusting steel.
Kwayana spent his life insisting that no life is cheap and that a State which forgets this forfeits its claim to lead us. When gunfire breaks out at a police witness’s gate and a citizen dies in a police lockup, lawlessness has taken up residence at the heart of the State. Once again, black men are the first to learn how little their lives are valued by the State.
I want every duly elected government of Guyana to succeed. What stands most in the way of the current government is what you have become, and the Tuesday Table that has grown up around you. The Tuesday Table is not the party, and certainly not the Cabinet. Most of those elected on your party’s list have never sat at it and never will. It has no standing of its own, no life apart from you. You go, and it goes with you, along with its increasing capacity to manufacture the discontent that will end the PPP’s majority in 2030.
Once a friend and admirer, I was too embarrassed to greet you at the King’s State Reception. I was simply too disbelieving and disgusted by what you have become. I am not naïve, and I do not expect you to leave of your own accord. This letter, therefore, is as much for your party as it is for you. Its interests are best served by your departure. I know you lack the courage to make yourself unnecessary, but I am so delighted that so many in the PPP’s leadership are keen to choose electoral survival over your malignant ego. You are the overbearing patriarch of your party, Chief. Leave before all the good you did is entirely overwritten by the stories of suffering you now inflict on us.
Remember our first meeting in your Johannesburg Rosebank Hotel suite in 2002? I arrived excited and a little wary and left giddy with hope for our country and your offer to join your cabinet. What stayed with me was your seeming willingness to listen empathetically, contest ideas robustly, debate passionately and, apparently, learn continuously. My admiration was almost embarrassingly complete. I went home and promptly changed several passwords to variations of your name: ‘bharatt01’ and its cousins!
We next met in 2006, in your offices. Having again fended off your entreaties to join your government, we settled on my serving as your Honorary Consul to South Africa, and you deployed Doc to keep an eye on me. That relationship developed into a BigBromentorship, until his incapacitation allowed those around him to regulate our contact. I remember the respect with which you treated him in those years. Then there was room around you for another man’s stature and judgement. That has changed, disastrously.
Almost single-handedly, you returned Indo-GTers, especially the rural cohorts, and much of the Amerindian population to our political and social mainstream. I have written that this will prove to be your uncontestably transformative legacy and the single most valuable post-1992 achievement in our country. The LCDS gave Guyana an original global voice at a time when small countries rarely had one. These are substantial accomplishments that no one should diminish. But poor, and not-so-poor, Indians who stood taller after 1992 because of your transformative leadership, should not now have to lower their voices before you. That distance between the promise I encountered in Johannesburg and the mafia culture that has grown up around you is the source of my greatest disappointment.
Those early years were also when you built your team by erasing Jaganites. Look at it now, around the Cabinet and the Hard Rock’s Karaoke table, and you see men much like yourself. ‘Country’ boys, many of them, raised in rural Indian villages during the PNC years, whose lives were marked by a constant, low-level harassment at the hands of PNC State officials and a denial of dignity and agency. I had to travel all the way to Cambridge to learn just how deeply that resentment still runs.
The student assigned to be my Big Brother there, one Sukhnandnan, gently dismissed my comparison of ugly British racialism with my recollection of halcyon days of interracial harmony. He firmly told me that whenever the police came into his village, his parents would hide him and his siblings under the bed, fearing that “black man was coming to kill awe”. I was upset, and that brought our 30-minute relationship to an end. You recognised the force of those memories, gave them language and organisation and, using Jagan’s Marxian mobilisation structures, turned the PPP into the most disciplined and loyal political machinery in the country. It remains so today.
With your omnipotence entrenched and billions of barrels of sweet, light lucre at your disposal, you sit at your Tuesday Table, holding court, being served expensive liquor and lavish meat platters, while scores of ordinary Guyanese look on, hoping to be beckoned over. Not Freedom House, and most certainly not State House. Just the crass bling of Hard Rock Cafe. Burnham rode aloof on a white horse; you preside from your Tuesday Table.
Chief, you have become the Burnham of the PPP, and yours is a visionless State of Unease.
The damage reaches well beyond Freedom House. The World Bank expects our economy to grow by almost 24 per cent this year, yet your subjects are growing poorer. Around the corner from where I live, at Federal Bakery in Queenstown, people sauntered in and bought a whole loaf in 2023. Today, they step inside tentatively and ask the price of half a loaf before deciding whether their child will eat that night. All the while, our burgeoning wells produce 1.25 barrels of the sweetest light crude for every Guyanese, wherever they may be in the world.
Under Burnham, the pipe leaked at every joint, and those leaks, however crooked, wet a great many yards. Today, the leaks are sealed, with the only one tap, at the Tuesday Table. The crude is light and flows freely, but the money it earns is strangely viscous and does not seep down to ordinary citizens. And the tide bringing in the oil money is also carrying away our graduates because, in your Guyana, connections outrank qualifications, and a UG degree is a passport, not a ladder. How many adult children of your Cabinet members live full-time in Guyana?
To trace how you have unmoored yourself from Jagan’s PPP, I must set down, with regret and absolutely no pleasure, some things we shared in confidence. I do so because they concern the whole country and expose the farce of your recent call for unity, which debased patriot Corbin’s remembrance.
Let me take you back to the No-Confidence Motion and the question of who would front the party at the 2020 election. After I had once again demurred from the PM role, you insisted that hard work and loyalty were the qualities you had always selected for. But loyalty to whom, and to what? When I suggested an international role for you, one that would give a new leader room to grow, you seemed very hurt and upset, as though I had suggested that you were no longer useful. You had failed to learn the Kwayana lesson. The need to remain indispensable had already become a comfort to your youthful insecurities, leaving you unable to contemplate others shining.
The months that followed brought us closer than ever. Throughout 2019 and into the elections, you frequently repeated your fear of violence. I laughed it off, but your fear was palpable, and I believe it was part of what made you willing to do what came next.
As the count stalled in 2020, you and I worked out a Sharing of Governance Agreement (SGA), a process and name my Elder suggested. You specifically asked that I NOT discuss our discussions with your PPP colleagues. My cousin Rawle, my then Dutch partner, Nienke de Leeuw, and a certain professor (he, I reckon, fears your retribution/hopes for your favour) provided me with support to complete the proposal.
At the SGA’s core was the understanding that the Winner of an internationally supervised recount would assume the Presidency. But what you agreed to give the Loser speaks volumes, especially as the current elections court case trundles on. The Loser would control Natural Resources, Finance, Local Government, Home Affairs and Agriculture.
Let that land…….gently……take that in.
The SGA was the centerpiece of a National Convergence Proposal (NGP) – 105 days of national dialogue to transform a bargain between political leaders into a settlement between our peoples. Much of this was the work of a Saints schoolfriend, perhaps our most prominent community interlocutor.
The then APNU leadership, except one,, never knowingly underperfoming, rejected it, berating me for “wha kinda Parris yuh are, working with de coolie people to tek away we ting”. That stupidity is theirs to own.
Then came the ‘Pompeo’ `letter, and with it, the certainty that the result would go your way. You promptly abandoned the SGA, leaving me with a question that has never been satisfactorily answered: Were you prepared to share power because you believed Guyana needed it, or only because the alternatives of violence, disorder and embargoed oil proceeds had frightened you witless?
Which brings me to the tests of any leader. Political leadership has always rested on three timeless pillars: patriotism, competence and judgement. Lose any one of them, and even a formidable leader becomes vulnerable.. When we first met, you projected all three.
Patriotism first. It begins with the SGA because walking away from it was one of the least patriotic things I have watched you do. It offered something our politics had never managed: a government that did not rest on one people defeating the other. Cheddi passed this test. He and Burnham had agreed on terms for national unity, which were due to be signed on the very day in 1985 Burnham died. Nevertheless, Cheddi continued pressing for those terms, with nothing to gain except the dignity of patriotic service beyond party interests, until Hoyte shelved them. You have mastered the exercise of raw, crude power, but greatness continues to elude you.
At Robert Corbin’s tribute on 14 October, you delivered a speech of supreme tactical genius. Our two old parties, you said, must work together ‘of necessity’, or both will face extinction. My opinion of the legitimacy of your conversion does not matter. What matters is what your fellow PPP members think. With WIN rising behind you, once again necessity, rather than conviction, rules. Unity offered only in the face of impending loss is not patriotism. It is insurance, bought in a fire and cancelled when the smoke clears.
Then there is competence. In our recent GBJ conversation, Ruel Johnson said that, since 2020, you have been less involved in daily administration and more focused on major policy. The gas-to-energy plant is nothing if not major policy and every day reinforces your incompetence where it matters most to the nation.
And finally, judgement. Why did the country’s most important power contract go to a contractor whose record our own press has repeatedly questioned? The more indispensable a leader becomes, the weaker the safeguards around him. And the weaker those safeguards become, the more indispensable he appears. That is the trap. A circle that cannot say no to you cannot save you from yourself.
Why has your party not acted?
Your party’s operating manual came from Jagan’s Marxism, but its temper is that of the villages that carried it. After the split with Burnham, those villages were overwhelmingly Indian and largely Hindu. Many of your party’s supporters continue to endure a crushing cost of living in the hope that their turn at the Tuesday Table will come, if not in this life, then in the next. Mixed with the old fear of a return to the PNC years, the hope of a better next life is a powerful instrument of political discipline. People waiting for a seat at a table do not overturn it, and they do not cross the man who controls the guest list. Patience is the PPP supporter’s key virtue, and the Tuesday Table has turned it into an endless line of credit.
Within the party, the case for your indispensability rests on losing the majority in 2011 and losing power in 2015. But those years represented a regency, not an absence. Since then, the President has topped the Congress poll and, in 2025, led the party to its largest-ever vote. Your party’s members can no longer convince themselves that they need you to win. On 5 October, he said, “It is not enough to grow. We must grow together.”
Some in your party will argue that, with WIN at the gate, this is no time to change generals. They have it backwards. You and WIN need each other. Fear of WIN keeps your party’s base loyal to you, while you keep WIN’s base angry. Your party needs neither the fear nor the anger. In 2030, it will field a new candidate. If you still control the Tuesday Table then, WIN will not campaign against that candidate. It will campaign against you, and the country will have to endure another election centred on one man. Without you, WIN would have to make its case. With you, it need only point to YOU. Suffering Guyanese may yet thank you for one thing, Chief. In making the Mohameds your bogeymen, you have guaranteed your own downfall.
So, Chief, being made to go need not mean being driven out, and your party has every reason to spare you that indignity. The next Congress should end with a new General Secretary, and the party’s candidate for 2030 should be chosen through a ballot of its members, with the count published and independently observed. The responsibilities you currently exercise should return to the ministers and institutions legally entrusted with them, allowing President Ali and his successors to govern without your malevolence hovering over them. Guyana could put your name forward for an international role in climate and forests, where the LCDS still speaks for you. Guyana needs a healing leadership, and you and your Tuesday Table are not it.
So, Chief, can the man I met in Johannesburg, who once manufactured consent, still find the courage to make himself unnecessary, or will your party have to find that courage for you?
With warm regards,
Kojo
Discussion