Peeping Tom - Time to End the Debate

Peeping Tom – Time to End the Debate

Jun 07, 2008 Peeping Tom

One race has ended in the United States of America. Senator Hillary Clinton is today expected to concede to Senator Barack Obama in the race for the Democratic Nomination for the Presidency of the United States.

It became clear last week after the delegates made a decision in relation to Florida and Michigan that the Democratic Party was becoming tired of the long slug-out between two admirable candidates. The general feeling was that taking this contest into the Convention would be unhealthy. The decision was taken to put an end to it. With enough super-delegates pledging their support to Obama to give him a majority, this effectively left Senator Clinton with very little choice but to concede.

Here in Guyana it is also time to put and end to a unending issue which like the race for the Democratic Nomination is going nowhere. The supporters of Vishnu Bisram have been at odds with Freddie Kissoon, one of this newspaper’s columnists; and Freddie has in turn been at odds with them. This has produced an unceasing flow of exchanges in the press that is going nowhere.

It is time that this debate is closed. This I intend to do here.

As things stand now, Freddie has done a great deal of harm to the credibility of Vishnu Bisram. Freddie has asked some simple questions concerning the occupation of the pollster and so far the responses have been highly evasive. With each reply Bisram is embarrassing himself. If he does not wish to dignify a question that he thinks is irrelevant, he should simply state this rather than providing the sort of answers that he is providing.

Freddie questions in as much as they may seem personal are germane to the issue of funding of the many polls conducted by Bisram which the Peeper has already indicated has demonstrated a remarkable degree of accuracy. Freddie has a right to ask about the funding for the polls since as we know, polls are costly and the credibility of a poll often depends on the degree to which the pollster can insulate himself or herself from his or her financiers.

The supporters of Bisram have deemed Freddie’s questions irrelevant. They continue to stress that Freddie’s questions have nothing to do with the poll. When it comes to the funding of polls, I think however that whoever funds them is important.

Bisram’s polls are usually carried out under the title of NACTA – the North American Caribbean Teachers Association. Freddie has a right to question whether this unit exists, and to ascertain its executives.

Freddie was wrong in the past when he went after the Turkeyen Research Unit. He went looking all over Turkeyen and found no such unit. Well, the fact that the unit was named after the area in which the university is located does not mean that it has to be situated there. After all both Freddie and myself write for the Kaieteur News which is named after one of Guyana’s landmarks but which is not located anywhere near Kaieteur Falls. Similarly, the Stabroek News is not located in Stabroek. Therefore it is quite plausible for there to have been a Turkeyen Research Institute which is named after Turkeyen but which is located elsewhere. Who knows the North American Caribbean Teachers Association may even be located in Guyana.

I cannot understand why if polls were conducted in the name of NACTA why Bisram and his supporters cannot simply state the names of the executives of NACTA. I cannot also understand what possible risks Bisram will expose himself to by simply stating where he works.

My suspicions about Bisram’s polls however have to do with other considerations. Despite all the exchanges in the press about the polls Bisram is said to have conducted in Guyana, I am yet to find a single Guyanese who has confirmed that he or she was interviewed in one of these polls. This is highly unusual in Guyana.

In the last poll, it was stated that over eight hundred persons were polled. Surely, somebody must know someone who was interviewed as part of this or some other poll conducted by Bisram
I have also long suggested to Bisram that he publish, with their consent, the names of three persons who helped to do the interviews for him. If he does this and these persons confirm that they did work for him, I am willing to lend credibility to his polls.

Otherwise, despite his track record of accurately predicting election results in the Caribbean, I will have to disregard any future polls that he commissions.