By Kojo M. Parris
When Nelson Mandela stepped down from South Africa’s presidency after a single term, he did something rarer than winning power: he surrendered it while it was still entirely his to keep. A grateful nation would readily have given him another term. He judged instead that the true measure of what he had built was whether it could stand without him – and history has made him larger for stepping back. George Washington made the same calculation two centuries earlier, declining a third term when the office was his for the asking; as did Cincinnatus, he laid down absolute command to return to his plough. The pattern is as ancient as it is unmistakable.
The greatest leaders build something strong enough to outgrow them, and then they find the courage to become unnecessary.
Bharrat Jagdeo and I first met when he attended the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Back in the late 1980s my Dad had been ambassador to the USSR and chucklingly referred to Jagdeo’s persistence in picketing the Moscow embassy despite his repeated invites for all Guyanese to use the facilities, including the ‘PPP’ students. But any initial nervousness dissolved as our meeting in his Rosebank Hotel suite stretched into the third hour. That our young, confident President had given so much of his time left me feeling seen, validated. I was struck not just by his keen intelligence, energy and easy command of difficult issues – Guyanese leaders have always had that. What gave me fanboy vibes was his ability to listen, project empathy and an apparent willingness to contest, debate, even learn.
Visiting home in 2006, we met again and, fending off his entreaties to join his government, we settled on my becoming his Honorary Consul to South Africa (this was an arrangement I could sell to my father!). Henceforth, we were in contact at least monthly, sometimes more often, discussing all manner of government and personnel related matters. He additionally deployed Doc Luncheon to Big Brother me, a relationship that morphed into a fraternal mentorship.
Then as now I was hugely impressed; he has few equals in Guyanese public life for sheer political capacity, work rate and tactical focus. His achievements are many and real, and some are the stuff of proud legacy. Almost singlehandedly he returned Indo-Guyanese, especially the rural cohorts, and much of the Amerindian population, to our political and social mainstream. I am convinced this, more than anything this will be his uncontestably transformative legacy and has been the single most valuable post-1992 achievement in our country. And the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) elevated Guyana as a genuinely original and innovative voice on the world stage. These alone are massive achievements.
But they are incomplete artefacts of nation building – bridges, not a destination. The work of bringing one part of the nation in from the cold matters only if it leaves no other part feeling alienated, or transactionally included. As it was for the Indo-Guyanese communities before 1992, Afro-Guyanese and other non-ethnically defined groups now feel excluded, or at best transactionally included. And until that is remedied we cannot begin to focus on whether poverty is crowded out by a society at peace with itself, one proud not to litter, public servants ready to serve, in every community, regardless of political beliefs or cultural orientation.
But this larger work has stalled, even reversed, and we must confront the reason with clarity.
Our governance architecture is a growing miasma of dysfunction: a system built around a narrow executive, in which the governing party’s operating model replaces the State’s – a centre of gravity located in Freedom House, not State House or Parliament. The problem is not just that Jagdeo pontificates on almost every substantive matter; it is that his exceptional authority has created perverse incentives beneath and around him. Difficult decisions travel upward. Officials wait for political cover. They draw influence from proximity to him, and citizens learn that access works better than process. And personal centrality at the top produces institutional stasis below. Formal systems ossify, and are thus bypassed, so they stay unexercised, weak, and because they stay weak, still more intervention is needed to keep the system seem functional – Ministerial Outreaches – appears necessary.
The awful charade of Ministerial Outreaches is access theatre, shouting our systemic dysfunction out loud, cameras flashing, influencers prepping for posting. And for the citizen who reaches the right official, on the right day, the result can be gratifying, breathlessly splashed across social media. But for the 95% who did not win that day’s lottery of access, the lesson is corrosive. Why endure a ministry’s bureaucracy if a call to someone powerful works better? Access accretes value, discretion displaces process, and once responsive government hardens into the very distortion that makes further intervention necessary. This is how clientelism infects the soul of our people, nurturing a cynical descent into ‘hustler’ culture.
For a metaphor of what BJ has built, witness Tuesdays at the Hard Rock when he sets up court – no singing, no engagement with the room of more than 100, he commands a table of 5 or 6, continually brought expensive liquor and platters of rich meats. Most in the room watch, hoping to be seen, beckoned up; a few of us approach, and mostly received with casual unregard. The country in miniature: one laden table, an anxious perimeter, the masses waiting for their unikely turn.
Oil now pours vast new resources through this same narrow architecture, raising the stakes of our national fragility enormously. And here is the danger absent any euphemism – a country can grow rich even as its citizens grow poorer by the day.
For those of us who have watched this reality show elsewhere, we know that Guyana is well down the road to becoming yet another sclerotic petro-state – awash in cash flows, hollow in institutions, our historically extraordinary human capital, scattered and squandered. The standard of living for our people slides remorselessly. No need for GDP metrics – spend a few minutes at Federal bakery on Peter Rose St, Queenstown: in 2023 folks rushed in and grabbed a whole loaf. In September 2026, stepping tentatively, they are often asking for, and the price of, part loaves. Meanwhile more than 900,000 barrels are pumped each day – Each Guyanese can take home one barrel of the sweetest light crude, each day.
That is not an argument against Jagdeo’s abilities, or even his intent. It is an indictment of how the extraordinary power he has accumulated is being deployed: to concentrate decisions in one man, and to make our gifted nation dependent on his continued presence.
This is our unfolding national tragedy.
But none of this began with him. Forbes and Cheddi started as allies in a single independence movement, and then allowed external pressures and internal ambition to drive an ethnic wedge in which Guyanese still subsist. Burnham’s Declaration of Sophia would elevate Party Paramountcy over the State’s institutions, and the 1980 Constitution embedded an executive autocracy. Jagdeo has doubled down on this governance Frankenstein, leveraging his considerable post-1992 moral authority and our recent oil revenues to enfeeble the public service and, as GPL recently demonstrated, render attendant institutions competence-free zones.
A leader of Jagdeo’s stature could choose differently. He might choose to be the person who finally helps close this nation’s wounds, rather than preying on them. This would be a role worthy of a former President.
So let this stand as a reminder of counsel previously shared, and now truer than ever. The world retains a memory of him that would befit a senior global leadership role – not UN Secretary-General, but leadership of UNEP or the Green Climate Fund? Both are superb fits, and become available in 2027.
And if all else fails, perhaps his greatest contribution to Guyana could be to rebuild the institutions so diminished by him and his forever nemesis, the long-dead Burnham. Then let him will a grateful people with national institutions sufficiently strong that Guyana no longer requires Bharrat Jagdeo – that would be the courage to become unnecessary.
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