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I am a few years older than Roger Forbes McDonald Luncheon was at the time of his recent death and we attended the same primary and secondary schools at about the same time but never then met. Headmaster Hoyte had opened a private primary school, Hydoll, in Kitty and, perhaps to raise its status, decided to offer a few scholarships to promising African children. He came to Beterverwagting and offered one such scholarship to my sister Yvonne, and it must have been the same for Luncheon for when I sent her news of his death and solicited information, her response was ‘You are asking my brain to recall things that I haven’t thought about since I was 11-12. He was a bright guy: that I remember about him.’
My mother insisted that my sister could not go to Hydoll if I did not and since she could not afford the full fee, Hoyte agreed to take me for half the fee. Yvonne did not let Hoyte down: she won Bishops but would have had to pay some portion of the fees and was offered a full police scholarship to attend Central High School. Since my mother was already paying for me to go to Tutorial High School, Yvonne had to make do with Central. Luncheon first went to Tutorial High School and then to Queen’s Collage.
I can remember first hearing of Luncheon from Colonel Desmond Roberts (then a captain and famed as the officer who hoisted the independence flag). He invited Luncheon, a few others and me to his home at Camp Ayangana, but I had to leave before Roger, who lived in nearby Kitty, arrived. Although I frequented Freedom House quite a bit in the mid-1970s, I cannot remember meeting Luncheon until about the election campaign of 1992.
Throughout my time in government, Roger and I had quite a good relationship, and the universal assessment of him both as HPS and as a medical doctor was that he was, as my sister said, a bright guy. I arrived at an unrated Ethiopian hotel very late one night and had to sleep on a lice infested bed. About two days later, I began to ich and was concerned that I had picked up some strange disease because the lotions doctors gave me in Guyana were not working. After a Cabinet meeting I decided to broach the issue with Luncheon and the moment I began he giggled. He said, ‘I smelt it when we passed in the corridor and thought it served you right for frequenting cheap whorehouses. They water down the lotion here too much in Guyana plus Ethiopia might have a different variant of the lice. Get a bottle in London when you get there on Sunday and it should do the trick’. It did in less than twelve hours!
In his job as the Head of the Presidential Secretariat and Secretary to Cabinet (HPS) Roger’s modus operandi was at first quite bothering. For instance, in the first PPP government (1992-1997), I became Minister of Labour, Housing, Human Services and Social Security and decided that the labour sector needed fundamental changes that required the reform of some old and the adoption of new laws. Yet Roger appeared to consider every piece of legislation that I took to him to be unnecessary. These were not minor legislations: they dealt with occupational health and safety, discrimination in employment, severance pay, trade union recognition, domestic violence, etc. This was even more baffling as all the proposed legislation had the approval of apex bodies of the trade unions and private sector.
But after a couple of occasions, it struck me that Luncheon’s strategy for dealing with these possibly controversial matters was correct. Given the nature of his work as chief-of-staff/gatekeeper, he could not afford to agree with or be sympathetic to such fundamental action before first getting the go-ahead of his political master. Indeed, it would not have been good for his reputation to repeatedly have to return with bad news. So he sought to lessen expectations and return with good news, which he did on every occasion with the labour matters. I believe it was at a 1997 campaign meeting in Kitty that after Roger was finished speaking, I mentioned that his entire speech had been based on the labour bills he had said he thought were not necessary and his response: ‘It’s politics my boy; its politics.’
On the campaign trail, Luncheon could be quite unrestrained and/or deliberately provocative. If he and I had to speak at a meeting in a PNC stronghold, I always found some reason why I should speak first and if possible then leave. The first time I came upon Roger’s campaign style was when a friend lent the PPP his plane to campaign in the hinterland and upon landing (I believe at Mahdia), we were confronted by a group of women with placards shouting ‘Luncheon: we are the PNC prostitutes.’ Apparently at a public meeting somewhere around Charlestown, Luncheon had implied that some troublesome PNC female supporters were prostitutes!
Luncheon deserves any honour the country wishes to bestow upon him. He was staunchly loyal to the PPP and Guyana, and I believe that at one point he genuinely contributed to trying to bring Guyana’s warring tribes together. Indeed, on hearing of his death Lance Carberry, a lead spokesperson for the PNC on that occasion, called from England to remind me of Roger’s contribution. However, the effort to commend him should not have associated him so closely with one of most the contentious periods in modern Guyanese political history when official representatives of the African people suggested that the PPP had orchestrated the killing of over 1,431 Africans (Stabroek News’ assessment is about a third of this number).
Given the scope of this responsibilities, Luncheon could have been appropriately commemorated in another less controversial manner but notwithstanding all the hype about One Guyana, in the absence of practical wisdom, political self-interests trumped national unity. Speaking at the renaming of the National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) building as the Doctor Roger Forbes Luncheon Building, President Irfaan Ali reminded us that ‘intelligence is not about spying,’ but rather about ‘gathering the relevant, timely information to ensure the safety and security of the country and its people… Dr Luncheon’s strength was his ability to comb through volumes of data and sift out what really constituted a genuine threat to security which would warrant attention.’ Let us hope that sifting out what would warrant attention is not equated as having the responsibility for what was done. The buck stops with the president of the day.
In this regard a couple of Luncheon’s aphorisms are quite telling. When he said there appeared to be a phantom squad operating, he seemed to be disassociating himself and the official PPP from phantom squad actions. And he obviously could not have meant that there were no academically qualified Africans to be appointed ambassador. But particularly in our conflictual ethnic context, qualification for diplomatic posts includes loyalty and bent upon ethnic/political dominance, the PPP was reluctant to appoint ambassadors who might informally criticise them.
My meetings with Roger Luncheon tended to end with my jovial enquiry about the status of his magnum opus, in which he promised was to explain in great style and detail the more important of his contributions. I wonder if he got around to completing it.