What propelled Mervin’s assertions about “mounting concerns”?

Sep 02, 2008 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
I must respond to Emile Mervin’s letter “Seecharran mixes up growing fears with groundless falsities” (Kaieteur News, August 31).

The President of Guyana is a political player in a State which has an adversarial political structure.
Inevitably, the utterances and actions emanating from the President, and indeed from politicians representing any party within this structure, will give rise to concerns, real or imagined, expressed by political opponents.

It will be helpful if Mr. Mervin takes us into his confidence by identifying the evidence which propelled him to his emphatic assertion concerning these “mounting concerns”.

We can safely discount the source as being the views of the reasonable Guyanese travelling on the minibuses, since Mr. Mervin continues to enjoy the pleasures of exile and has not set foot on this land which he labels as one of “partisan political bickering, unrelenting economic hardship and social unease over armed criminals on the loose”.

We can also safely discount letters to the press as the fount of information for Mr. Mervin’s assertion, since he laments that the local editors display a lack of balance by not allowing letters critical and complimentary of Government to be published.

It must be, then, that Mr. Mervin’s views are shaped by his surfing the Internet, which he informs us is his source of mixed reviews. My response to his choice of the Internet as the source of his intelligence is encapsulated in the pithy observation of Robert Wilensky that “we’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare: now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true”.

Mr. Mervin suggests that I am a guy (Internet lingo?) who is not “politically savvy” in that I have failed to recognise that the PNC did not raise concerns over the PPP’s refusal to delete the constitutional protections enjoyed by the President because the PNC plans to take the benefit of such protections on their return to power.

Anyone who is a little politically savvy will find this argument difficult to reconcile with Mr. Mervin’s assertion that it is a given that the PPP will likely win elections in Guyana based on racial voting.

Apart from that, Mr. Mervin conveniently overlooks the fact that the Constitutional Reform Commission was comprised of representatives from a broad cross-section of the Guyanese community, including the Parliamentary political parties, The Guyana Bar Association, the TUC, major religious bodies, private sector, etc: The Commission also held public consultations throughout Guyana, and based on their recommendations, the President’s prerogative to appoint senior judicial functionaries was eclipsed, and a term limit imposed on his office. None of the representatives moved to curtail the Presidential immunity which Mr. Mervin feels will result in sheer lawlessness if some Guyanese. interpret the President’s remarks and actions as abuse of authority.

Could it be, Mr. Mervin, that the civil society groups also entertain secret hopes of securing political power someday? Or is it that they did not spend enough time on the Internet?

In my letter, I was at pains to point out that Mr. Mervin’s analysis of Justice Ramlal’s ruling was misconceived, and I pointed to the shortcomings of his commentary on the judgment.

I do not propose to go over that again, since Mr. Mervin obviously has a closed mind on the issue.
His dismissive response that, in my attempt to set the record straight on the judge’s ruling, I “wasted time repeating what we already know” about the matter demonstrates the wisdom of the Biblical injunction against casting pearls before swine.

Mahase Seecharran