Dear Editor,
Hear it in his voice and see it in his eyes. Fear! Abject fear being expressed by Bharat Jagdeo in his stunning press conference recently.
This sorry guy has found himself in an untenable position. He operates like a man cornered and he might just have put himself there.
Listen to his ramblings. His thoughts and sentences mangled, incomplete and incoherent, but he goes on and on with his dead man’s mantra ‘APNU rigged the elections.’ If APNU rigged the elections why would you be expressing so much fear? Have you indeed painted yourself into a corner?
Everybody understood that the figures that came out of the interior regions were suspect and the noise that was created inside and outside Ashmin’s during the initial count was nothing more than a distraction from the focus on those suspicious figures.
Now we get a chance to review those figures – all figures, and that is the source of Jagdeo’s fears. But let us look at how he got himself in that position. I hear comments all the time that Jagdeo is one of the smartest politicians that Guyana has ever produced and that he has the ability to outfox his opponents.
I always object because smarts and artfulness come with finesse, style and class. Jagdeo has none of those qualities. You can’t be smart if you have to resort to bribery and other forms of corruption (criminal activity) to achieve your goals.
If you can’t rely on your candidate, your platform, your track record or your vision to win an election, how smart can you be? I always say that Jagdeo was among the few people in all of history who had a great opportunity, at an early age, to lead a country and enjoy the support of an absolute majority if he cared for the people.
Instead, he squandered that opportunity, either because he was too immature to handle the vast powers that were given to him as President, or he had no capacity to understand that division as a political strategy was doomed to failure.
So he served his two terms and left under a dark cloud of antipathy instead of leaving like a beloved statesman who served with dignity and integrity and whose legacy, input and advice would always be sought after and relied upon going forward.
But he became so addicted to wielding that power (because he never understood it) that he now has a morbid obsession to regain it at all costs, including risking criminality. Hence the reason for the fear. There is a very high probability that the recount will expose criminality, an easy win for the APNU/AFC, or both, and that is what is engendering the fear in Jagdeo’s eyes and in his voice.
The man is broken and he has no-one to blame but himself. When you have such a psychological burden to bear because you know that you had it all and you threw it away, it becomes impossible to mask the fear anywhere, especially in your eyes and in your voice.
Yours
Raul French
