Radio and dictatorship

Oct 31, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Life is indeed funny. I was having coffee at a well known Georgetown café with Mark Benschop yesterday morning when Benschop informed a number of European and American diplomats that he had started up a radio station. They all agreed that it was a good move.
Later in the day, I got a telephone call that the police and officials from the National Frequency Management Unit (NFMU) were at Benschop home to seize his broadcasting equipment. Hours later, I got another call that Benschop was in police custody. The story of elected dictatorship goes on. And while it does, the opposition merrily takes up its servile positions in the “august” chambers of the National Assembly.
President Jagdeo told a press conference that Guyana has one of the best Constitutions in the world (a column of mine disputed that; no way the present 1980 Constitution can be one of the finest in the world). Recently, he told another press meeting (The President excels at his press conferences because it is his turf and the right questions are hardly forthcoming) that Guyana has consulted the nation on LDCS in an open and transparent way that not even the democratic, developed countries have done with their own consultations.
The media for one of two reasons do not press the President on these questionable statements. Either they could not be bothered with these high-sounding phrases of Mr. Jagdeo or they seem disinclined to engage him to avoid a confrontation.
So we have one of the world’s admirable Constitutions and when it comes to securing the views of the Guyanese, the Guyana Government embarks on consultations that are more democratic than most states in the world.
Yet despite this “laudable” balance sheet, we have a tyrannical caricature that most countries do not – one radio station. Please note that in Trinidad two weeks ago the High Court ordered cost against the Government for too long a delay in processing the radio license for the Maha Sabha.
So while in our neighbouring country of Trinidad, the Government was ordered by the courts to speed up the radio license to a religious organisation with which the opposition has a close relationship, in Guyana even non-political organisations cannot get a radio permit.
The radio monopoly is one of several thousands of pieces of evidence that points graphically and vividly to the PPP’s betrayal of every thread of political decency after it came to power in 1992.
In another article I will look at this party’s behaviour when it was in power in the sixties but I am convinced from all that I have read that the torrid opposition to Premier Jagan in the sixties was justified and that the Americans were right to pressure Dr. Jagan out of power.
I keep saying in many of my columns on the 60s that I would hope one day Kit Nascimento tells us the side of the opposition. The revisionist interpretation of the sixties cries out for birth.
I want to say in evanescent ways and in unambiguous terms that I believe the PPP leadership had to end up as a dictatorship because its founders and the protégés they nurtured never believed in the types of freedoms that form the essence of democracy. It was dictatorship in all its ugly forms when the house of a political activist, Mark Benschop, could be broken into to remove a simple piece of equipment that is alleged to be broadcasting on a frequency not approved by the NFMU.
Couldn’t have Benschop been summoned by court documents? Did he have to be kept in custody for the rest of the night? He is a nationally known citizen who would not have refused to appear in court if he was charged so why wasn’t station bail applied?
In the end it was but after he had spent more than 12 hours in custody.
It is useless tot argue that the mistreatment of Benschop was a shameless act of the elected dictatorship of the PPP. What more shamelessness do you need to see when the representative of the British Government used words that had a hidden meaning and that meaning was that the Guyana Government lied on the British when it claimed that the agreement on police reform to be financed by the British Government fell through because the British wanted to conduct military exercises in the interior using live ammunition.
We have entered into the last stage of elected dictatorship. This is the part when commonsense and logic are completely lost and tyranny takes over. With the loss of low carbon funds, the breakdown of Guysuco and GPL, and economic instability lurking around the corner, elected dictatorship in this country is set to become even more ruthless.