We criticize the Government: What about the others?

Apr 12, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

It is foolish to think that there is another institution that is powerful in a country as the State. The media, the business class, the trade unions are all formidable actors that can bring down hurricanes on the society but the State has no parallel. If the State gets out of control, society is doomed.
For this reason we all have to be extremely courageous and confront the State in its authoritarian mode. I believe we have an elected dictatorship in this country in which forms of it are worse than when Mr. Burnham governed Guyana with a tyrannical hand.

The Government of Guyana drifts from one immorality to another; from one illegality to another; from one perversity to another. The PNC ruled for 28 years yet there weren’t 28 scandals as egregious as they are under the present regime. Criticism and condemnation of the Government of Guyana and in particularly the Presidency are in order.
But we do an injury to natural law and the principles inherent in fair play when we refuse (yes, downright refuse) to castigate our fellow Guyanese for unbecoming conduct that has enormous implications for justice in this society. There were volumes written about Minister Kellawan Lall’s involvement in an unpleasant incident outside a liquor restaurant. That man was crucified.

At the time of writing, there isn’t even a one-sentence letter in the media about the episode of the imbroglio between the US Embassy and Mr. Norman Mc Lean and Ms. Sita Ramlal except for a descriptive editorial in the Stabroek News last week. If the US Embassy’s claim against Mr. Mc Lean was leveled at a Government Minister it would have filled all the space in the letter section of both dailies. The private media would have gone for the Minister’s jugular.
Are Mr. Mc Lean and Ms Ramlal too sacred to be commented upon? To complicate the situation, Mr. Mc Lean declined to comment.

The US Embassy announced a forgery involving Mc Lean and Ramlal. The closeness between these two goes way back to the student days at UG when we were all freshmen together at Turkeyen. It is one of Guyana’s enduring friendships.
Ms. Ramlal, through her lawyer, asserts that another worker perpetuated the fraud. If we accept that is so it cannot be denied that the fiction benefited Ms. Ramlal’s friend Mr. Mc Lean. Why isn’t the forger charged? Where is the investigation? Will there be an investigation?

This is a dangerous turn of events at the Registry of the High Court. For the US Embassy to announce that a forgery occurred in that institution which serves the cause of justice should be cause for concern among all stakeholders.
One day, readers of the newspapers saw splashed across the front pages that the tax files of a very controversial business family were missing. Wasn’t that strange? Last week, we read in the newspapers that a prestigious foreign company operating in Guyana had to take that same family to court and won after the commercial banks dishonoured three cheques for $14 million. No one writes about this business family that jumps from one controversy to the next.

Just imagine what would have happened if poor Mr. Kellawan Lall had written a cheque to his carpenter and the bank had refused it.
I regret an incident that I let pass and will always be haunted by that incident. I should have acted more decisively. In my daughter‘s form at an eminent private school, a student was caught kissing a boy and she was expelled without a hearing. I didn’t know until I was coming out of Bonny’s Meat Centre when her grandmother told me about what the school did.

She said her granddaughter was not even punished but just expelled without the home being informed before the decision was taken. I spoke to the Chairman of the Parent-Teacher Association who confessed he was helpless to act.
I should have acted by asking the court for an injunction on behalf of her grandmother because I had locus standi – I was a parent whose child attended the school and natural law was contemptuously tossed aside by school. Instead, I got the girl into St. Stanislaus College.

What became of that student I never knew but maybe her future was destroyed by that rash decision. No editorial or commentary is ever directed at the poor standards of many prestigious private schools.
My daughter attended both Marian Academy and School of the Nations and there was always a shortage of water and the toilets were always filthy. Have things changed since then? By the way what is Kellawan Lall up to these days?