EVERY SINGLE DAY THIS HAPPENS!

Nov 07, 2009 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The ruling People’s Progressive Party must summon an emergency meeting of its Central Executive to discuss the crisis that is besetting the presidency. The ruling party cannot afford to wait any longer before it addresses this matter which is causing this most important office in our land to be belittled.
Never in their wildest dreams would any of the senior leaders of the PPP have believed that the office of the presidency would have been brought to the state that it now finds itself. The leaders of the PPP must ask themselves how it is that the situation could have reached a state whereby some of the most unusual things could be said at a press conference hosted by the Head of Government.
Can you imagine any other Head of Government in the region being concerned about who is a self-confessed male kisser, who is watching whom lovingly and who is interested in whom? What has the high office of the presidency of Guyana come to when the country’s leading newspaper could be so disparaged and one of its columnists described as wacko?
Is there no sense of political correctness left that would have prevented some of the unfortunate comments that were made over the past few press conferences hosted by the President of Guyana?
The Guyanese people are not interested in who kissed whom thirty-nine years ago; neither are they interested in which reporter is showing a keen interest in another, or which reporter was seen looking lovingly at another. Does the media corps not find these things astonishing? Do they not find it shocking that in the midst of a press conference the President of Guyana has the time to observe which reporter is looking feelingly at another?
Why would a sitting president who has presided over a country which is moving from crisis to crisis have the time for such nonsense at his press conference? Does he not have anything better to do?
Or was it because one of the reporters had asked for a one-on-one interview, the same that is usually granted to state media operatives whenever there is a crisis? A press conference has its limitations. But in a one-on-one interview, the reporter has greater latitude in exploring certain issues to their fullest.
A one-on-one interview would be most interesting to get to the bottom of certain things including just which spouses and relatives of Ministers were approved by Cabinet to travel first class on taxpayers’ expenses; what is to be done about the issue of the clerk who purchased a sixty million dollar house and why there has been no announced investigation.
In a one-on-one interview, our reporter can also find out more about the tender process for drugs within the health care system, about the sale of public property and whether or not the President is comfortable with his Press Liaison.
There was even a dig at the recent press conference at this column. Well when Blame the Government and the Parrot were conceived as a right to respond to criticisms of the government, there was no concern then that these columns were maligning anyone. This newspaper in the interest of fairness granted the right to respond.
This column is not maligning anyone. This column has simply been offering a perspective. The government and also those who have a different opinion, have been free to offer a different perspective as has been done by the Ministry of Finance and a businessman who both replied to Peeping Tom columns.
The more important issue, though, is that the PPP as a ruling party must consider that the government it formed is behaving like a government under siege, and under siege not from any terrorist network, but from the Kaieteur News, since we were told that “every single day this happens” – that we are fabricating, and now that we cannot be facilitated with a one-on-one interview because we will distort what was said.
Well it does not require rocket science to find a way around this concern. If there is the fear that during a one-on-one interview, Kaieteur News will distort what was said, then the one-on-one should be taped and aired simultaneously with this newspaper’s publication so that the public would be able to compare what we wrote with what was said.
The PPP must take a serious look at what is happening and take steps to ensure that the mistake that was made ten years ago in putting executive power in the hands of youth is not repeated again in two years’ time.

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