By GHK Lall- “Only PPP Central Exec picked 2020 polls PM candidate -Jagdeo” (Demerara Waves, February 09, 2025). I quite agree with PPP General Secretary Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo. On its face, there is substance to what he said. Relative to where the decision rested upon who was to be the PPP prime ministerial candidate, no question that the PPP Central Executive would have the last word on who is picked. But as with so much that master hairsplitter and verbal swinger Jagdeo adds his voice to, there is more to the issue that is not said, what misleads naïve Guyanese.
The issue is best presented as a question. Did PPP presidential candidate Dr. Irfaan Ali communicate back during the runup to the March 2020 elections with Dr. Terrence Campbell on being his running mate, i.e., the prime ministerial candidate? Campbell has answered in the affirmative; Ali said ‘not so.’
After lining up his aging, overworked brain cells, Dr. Jagdeo decided that to enter the picture and put his greaseproof paper (leadership gloss) on the issue. Instead of putting an end to the controversy, all he did was give it an extension of life. Moreover, he exposes himself as being a dissembler. That is, covering up, by adding another layer of deviousness into the PM candidate question. Simply put: what is about straight talk, and what is more into twisting and deceiving.
PPP presidential candidate Ali was the new party star in the making. His own candidacy for the top spot was not universally welcomed inside the PPP Central Executive. Thanks to General Secretary Jagdeo, sense was hammered into holdouts and secret balloting closed the case. Irfaan Ali became the number one. With this as context, several points can be made, which I now do. For starters, Irfaan Ali was still feeling his way into his elevated role. He had to know from his past ministerial portfolio, how the Central Executive worked; specifically, the decisions that only that group of powerful PPP cardinals could make.
Second, given his own shaky passage to be the PPP’s presidential candidate, it defies political logic that Ali would have been so reckless, so cavalier, as to award to himself the sole determining power to decide who should be the candidate for PM. Irfaan Ali may be adventurous to a fault in public, particularly with his uncharted verbal navigations, but he is not that irresponsible, that reckless, to reach out on his own to Terrence Campbell and invite him to be his number two. An out-of-control maverick he is not.
Third, it is my position, therefore, that Candidate Ali was given the go ahead by the PPP Central Executive to connect with Campbell and communicate to him the party’s invitation to be its PM candidate. For emphasis, Ali did not hold that conversation with Campbell, by himself, about the PM running mate position being his for the taking.
When I give proper weight to the foregoing, I detect that General Secretary Jagdeo is half right. Whether a Campbell, a Johnson, or a Phillips, the PPP Central Executive has veto power or final approval authority. It is that other half that, in classic Jagdeo fashion, he kept to himself, and kept away from Guyanese. What was disputed or controversial before is now being camouflaged. It’s the usual daring of Jagdeo with suppressing what could clear the air, bringing closure to this chapter in local politics about who invited and who rejected competing for the number two office in Guyana.
“The presidential candidate does not determine who is the prime ministerial candidate will be. It’s the Executive of the PPP and I led that process to select the prime ministerial candidate,” was what Dr. Jagdeo told Demerara Waves Online News. There’s no objection here. The Central Executive, with Dr. B spearheading the process, had its crucial role “to select” the candidate that got the highest party marks.
Prior to the mechanics of that gathering “to select”, presidential candidate Ali had to be part of the process deciding on a pool of PM candidates. At least, he had to have been informed of who were in mind, because they made the PPP’s short list. Ali did not pluck Campbell name out of thin air, and all by himself. Again, I assert that he was instructed to engage Campbell. I urge thinking of this little tidbit: there was Ali just squeezing through a bruising (and disputed) internal party battle to be the presidential candidate, and there he was running off like a loose cannon inviting whoever pleases him to run for PM.
This is not the Irfaan Ali that Guyanese know when he was minister. It is not the Ali that Guyanese absorb since he became president. He doesn’t step out of line, and he knows his lines. I conclude that his instructions were as follows: go to Campbell and get him. Had he said ‘yes’, then it was to the PPP Central Executive, and for the process “to select” the prime ministerial candidate a done deal. Even when Jagdeo seems to walk straight, he tilts towards disingenuousness, camouflaging the whole story.
