Some people got fame picking on President Burnham. They didn’t deserve it

Mar 14, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

There was an outpouring of admiration for Sharief Khan after he died from countless PPP and Government officials. That is understandable. Khan was a shameless supporter of the PPP Government masquerading as a journalist. We didn’t see the same sympathy expressed for Clem David. It just goes to show who liked whom for what purpose. In all of this, veteran journalist and still one of the best in the Caribbean, Bert Wilkinson emerged as one of the decent and objective Guyanese citizens
Asked to comment on Khan, Bert said he was a good journalist but the trouble with Khan was that he wore his emotions on his sleeve. Wilkinson meant that he put his biases alongside his journalistic duties. For me he put his prejudice in front and called it journalism. I worked with Khan when I was a weekly columnist with the Stabroek News (SN). My impression of him was that he was a deep-seated racist and a PPP ideologue. His PPP sycophancy was logical and could easily have been predicted once the PPP won the 1992 election I will return to his role at SN but let us examine his rise to fame.
Khan, like Rickey Singh, received national admiration for their journalism during the reign of Forbes Burnham. Like hundreds of other known Guyanese, they rose to fame through their criticism of the Burnham dictatorship. But they showed their true colours once PNC dictatorship was replaced by PPP tyranny, once African hegemony was substituted for East Indian domination. For 19 years now, Singh, from his base in Barbados, sermonized the two thousand readers of the Chronicle with PPP achievements. The same amount of years Khan spent propagandising for the very regime
Khan and Singh have been exposed for their bogus journalism and the fame they acquired in the seventies, they didn’t deserve
Back to the days of Stabroek News. Mike Mc Cormack of the Guyana Human Rights Association can testify to the distorted journalism of Khan when he, Khan, was at Stabroek News. One session between Mc Cormack and De Caires on Khan’s bias lasted late into the night. Khan used his position at SN to push his PPP agenda. He was meticulous in shutting out the WPA. Rupert Roopnarine and other WPA leaders can testify to that fact. When the WPA wanted their things to be published in SN, they went through Miles Fitzpatrick.
One day, I saw Fitzpatrick hurriedly walking into the WPA’s office to collect their stuff. Khan was a PPP supporter but the problem was that he couldn’t write persuasively and intellectually and that curtailed his outpourings for the PPP. David De Caires knew Khan was not professional material but De Caires was biding his time. Once there was a talented replacement, De Caires would have let Khan go. It didn’t come to that. The PPP won in 1992 and Khan went to his natural cocoon
His intellectual weakness was his essential flaw. He was not a learned editor in the mode of people like Adam Harris, Anthony Calder, Bert Wilkinson etc. When I took a six month consultancy with Moses Nagamootoo when Moses served as Minister of Information, I renewed my acquaintance with Khan. I kept my distance from him because
I resented his racist feelings and his subjective journalism. He saw me as a helper who could have written editorials for him. But I ignored him. The truth is I was never enamoured of Khan because I saw through him when I was at Stabroek. He knew I knew his faults. He badgered me about knocking the PSU strike in 1999 but I refused conceding to do only one editorial. And that was on the racial role the strike was taking on.
One of the egregious sins of Khan was that he engineered the dismissal of African Guyanese at the Chronicle, including its manager Ulric Captain who refused to be his baggage boy. Those who heaped praise on Khan forget that he was removed as Chronicle’s editor, replaced by Anthony Calder. Khan resented this and undermined Calder. Contrary to what his PPP admirers stated, he didn’t reach retirement age at the Chronicle. He was removed at age 56. He then turned up at the Office of the President doing what he always did best – propaganda. The story of Sharief Khan and Rickey Singh and so many of them is that the mistakes of Forbes Burnham made them into household names. But they were never really professional journalists. Look at what they became long after Burnham died.

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