Peeping Tom…FREDDIE, YUH NOT STEADY!

Sep 03, 2008 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

Freddie Kissoon was once a highly-paid consultant to the PPP regime, a role that he relished, so much that his cockiness got the better of him. In trying, on one of his television shows, to embarrass a minister so as to advance the fortunes of one of his friends who at the time was not a minister but who clearly had an eye on a ministry, Freddie made some statements which resulted in him, Freddie, being fired.
There has been a great deal of debate as to whether the PPP government acted correctly in this matter. Whether the actions taken by the PPP in requesting his removal from the programme were correct does not, however, diminish the irrefutable fact that Freddie Kissoon, as he has done so often, acted unethically when he used a government programme to try to advance the career of one of his PPP friends at the expense of a sitting minister. It was a misuse of his role as moderator and he ought to have been sanctioned even though a warning may have sufficed rather than the summary dismissal to which he was subject.
Because of this and other incidents between him, the PPP and the government, he has become extremely bitter towards the government and ruling party.  He feels rejected by the party to which he once belonged and everything that he writes is conditioned on this personal feud that he has with the PPP.
Before the PPP came to power, he had his problems with the administration of the University of Guyana. He thus saw in the victory of the PPP a chance for the removal of those in the administration at his work place with which he had a tempestuous relationship.
He wanted someone that was not opposed to him at the head of UG. This is why he personally tried to broker an arrangement with Cheddi Jagan for Clive Thomas to be made Vice Chancellor of the University of Guyana. Of course, no one asked him to go and broker any arrangement on their behalf. He did this on his own because he had his own interests to serve.
Cheddi of course would have none of that.  The then President of Guyana was not interested in imposing any person as Vice Chancellor. That would have been worse than what Burnham and Hoyte had done at UG, and it would have also been undemocratic.
It is amazing that Freddie Kissoon has criticized what he saw as a recent political imposition on the University of Guyana, when he himself tried to push Cheddi in the same direction. For Freddie it is wrong if the present government bypasses a special search committee appointed to source a Vice Chancellor. But it was right for him to ask Cheddi to appoint someone he wanted without even an application being sent.
It is not entirely true that the PPP rejected WPA leaders for positions. The differences between the two former allies must be seen in its proper context and while this column has argued before that the PPP betrayed the WPA, it must be remembered that the divide between the two parties went way back to the wicked and devious position the WPA took in supporting a Presidential candidate put up by GUARD at a time when the PCD was in intense negotiations.
It must also be recalled that Dr. Jagan was willing to offer a WPA leader a position as Minister of Planning and Development, but the WPA had deep divisions internally over an approach to an individual person rather than to the party as a whole.
Freddie also mentions that when he was in his consultancy with the PPP government that there were weekly media meetings at which a person from the Mirror sat in. What he did not state was that he never personally during the meetings objected to the person being present. He did not because the person was at the time his friend and he had gotten a great deal of milk from that individual in the past.
In any event, he knew that the presence of that person at the meeting, while wrong, was of little consequence. The person was just trying to gain some knowledge and experience, and was hardly in a position to impose party paramountcy.
In relation to the decision of Hoyte to appoint a non-party person as Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Freddie is short-sighted. If he read the one-sided political analysis of Guyana’s foreign policy this same individual formulated in a book, Freddie would most likely not view that person as being politically impartial and independent.
The facts of the matter are that despite that appointment, the Public Service Ministry came under the Office of the President, and Hoyte, in victimizing persons from GUARD who took to speaking on that civic platforms, made it clear that you could not work for the government and not toe the line.

---

---