The Freddie Kissoon column – The predictable descent into danger

May 20, 2008 Freddie Kissoon

---

Why is it that the Guyana Government feels that illegal, immoral, fraudulent politics of the opposition PNC must be condemned by the society, and the very society must give the rulers a blank cheque to commit illegalities of their own? Is bad politics a negative value only found in opposition parties? Can governments do really nasty things in the countries over which they rule?
No one in this nation wants street politics to become violent. No Guyanese wants to see the opposition make life unbearable for the citizenry. But aren’t opposition supporters entitled to demand good governance?

We must always be careful that, when we speak of the people of Guyana, the numbers include almost half of the population that voted against the PPP. The PPP never ever had fifty-eight percent of the votes in any free general election. Why should an opposition party commit suicide by allowing the ruling regime to do what it wants?

Every day in this country I hear people tell me that they don’t think the AFC will get six seats again at the next election. I was at the Pegasus on Saturday night to attend a friend’s birthday and that topic came up among people who are dye-in-the wool AFC supporters.

They make this judgement because they do not see a discernible increase of pressure by the AFC on the Government. Last Sunday’s editorial in the Stabroek News was castigatory of the PNC’s recent street protest. The Stabroek News should go back and read all its editorials for the past year. It will find that two of them woefully lamented the lack of esprit de corps in the opposition.

Maybe a different person wrote last Sunday’s conclusion. This latest critique is unfair to the PNC leadership. I am not a supporter of the PNC and I do not think Mr. Corbin is the most eligible PNC politician to lead that party. In fact, it was troubling what the PNC arrangers did at the first protest march.

After the final destination was reached (at Parliament), AFC leader Raphael Trotman was refused space to speak on the platform. I wasn’t surprised. Show me a nationalist leader in the PNC and the PPP and I will show you where Castro has his nuclear weapons.

One cannot be honest in finding fault in the present confrontational mood that the PNC is in. The PNC should be joined by the Guyana Action Party (which, according to what I have been told, is no longer integrated with Ravi Dev’s ROAR), the AFC, the WPA, GHRA and others. Guyana is reeling from authoritarian politics.

Now that the confrontation is heating up, there are pleas from certain stakeholders for temperatures to cool. That is a good thing, and the sooner the better! But where does that leave the state of democracy? All around we see bad governance. It is not waning. On the contrary, it is never-ending.
Stakeholders do not need a scientific instrument to detect the apertures of unjust and unconstitutional rule in this country. The examples are barefaced.

This writer has every reason to denounce bad governance in Guyana. Read the Chronicle, and almost on a daily basis in the letters pages, my political commentaries, academic ability and personal life are libelled using the very methods that the Government accuses CN Sharma of adopting.

The person in charge of the state media is the President himself. The President quite often chastises his critics in the private media. His latest bone with the private media is the reporting and commentaries on the Sanata deal. Yet the Chronicle carries on with its despicable gutter journalism.
Is this the route the new newspaper will take? I can answer that question myself. Forgive me if I sound chauvinistic, because I am not, but it is quite possible that the letter section of the new daily will carry a few personal attacks on me; after all, it is two Chronicles we will be having when the new kid comes out.

Maybe they will name it Chronicle 2.

We had to reach the stage we have come to, with the PNC back on the streets. It was inevitable. We stood by and watched the Government move from one nauseating violation to another. The churches, the business community, several NGOs, several important stakeholders were silent. Only recently, Jesuit priest Malcolm Rodriques found his voice. Then, surprisingly, former Catholic Bishop of Guyana, Bishop Singh, made an open appeal in the Kaieteur News for President Jagdeo to be more lenient with C.N. Sharma. Interestingly, he sent his letter to the two independently dailies, but the Stabroek News didn’t publish his imploration.

I was told that some folks at the Stabroek were furious that the Bishop didn’t say a word about the advertisement ban. I don’t blame them.

We stood by and watched the humiliation of the opposition. All over Guyana, people were cynical about the PNC and AFC. Guyanese in general concluded that the opposition allowed the Government to do what it wanted. There was no one to stop the Guyana Government. In the midst of bad governance, we have the phenomenon of “acting.”

This is something that one does not find in other countries, and the opposition has just let it go by. Under the PPP there have been more “actors” than at any time in the history of politics. Do you know how many Government officials are acting in their functions? One of them is going to get an Academy Award.

---

---