The President’s advisors: Does this make sense?

Dec 23, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Defining moral values is not a hard task even though philosophers throughout the ages have disagreed as to what constitute moral values. I can think of fantastic minds like the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, and his English counterpart David Hume.
While Kant would agree that there are absolute values, Hume would prefer to contextualise all values. When all is said and done, there is a quantum of values that are not elusive and esoteric and can easily be accepted by people as most religious believers do.
Let us take a simple one. A blind man has lots of money in his house. Unscrupulous visitors come to the home and take his funds. This keeps going on. You go to see him, look at the tempting sums he has but you leave the cash alone. A friend then says to you that you should take some of the stuff because if you don’t others will, others have and others will continue to take so why not “get in.”
That is a logical explanation but it is not grounded in morality. The money will eventually dry up and if you don’t “get in” others will have what you easily could have possessed. One’s action should not be based on situational logics but on moral obligation.
Should you take the blind man’s money because others are taking it? The answer is no. What is involved here is moral obligation to a physically challenged person. We have moral obligations to our families, relatives, friends and employers.
If the police are harassing your employer in unjustified ways, then you should not make donations to the police unless the police stop their harassment of your boss. These are just simple descriptions of moral values so to speak. Of course the subject is far more involved than the way it is presented here. To make a long story short let us look at moral obligation in a specific context.
In a recent address to a private sector audience, President Jagdeo’s fulminations against the Kaieteur News were harsh and unrelenting. It was a situation of a country’s leader lashing out at the private media.
The President described what he believes is the unacceptable, anti-nationalist conduct of the newspaper. He cites the deliberate policy of sensationalising the news and secondly of front paging false items. He then called upon his audience to show moral obligation to their country by discontinuing their advertising placements with the newspaper. Simply, put, the President was urging his listeners to part company with the Kaieteur News.
Something is not right here. The President does not directly employ the people he was regaling with his boycott advocacy. These were private investors that are not directly obligated to the President.
Now if he can implore that the private sector cease having a business relation with the Kaieteur News, then his advisors have a moral obligation to show solidarity with their boss.
Let’s emphasise the point. President Jagdeo is contending that Kaieteur News does not serve the national interests and therefore giving the papers advertisements prolongs its existence. He wants the paper to be weakened or be curtailed by a withdrawal of patronage by the business community.
By what moral rule then, have his advisors taken up residency with the newspaper’s letter columns? This is an immense contradiction that the President needs to explain. If the Kaieteur News is an unacceptable media house, why then, two of the President’s leading political advisors have sought out the Kaieteur News to air their views?
Last Sunday, the Kaieteur News letter pages carried a letter each by Drs. Prem Misir and Randy Persaud. Important to note is that Dr. Misir downgrades his Chronicle columns to the status of a letter by resending them in letter form to the Kaieteur News. I doubt there is another columnist that will want to reduce his column to that level.
Not only does the President owe the nation an answer as to why two of his high-level appointees do not embrace his anti-Kaieteur News bandwagon but the men themselves should tell us what their thoughts on the matter are.
This is indeed an intriguing situation. If the Kaieteur News is a bad paper, why are the President’s men seeking the paper’s patronage? Do Misir and Persaud see their action as a betrayal of their boss? Or could it be that they know that the President’s attack is unwarranted and that the Kaieteur News is a valued and valuable institution that Misir and Persaud know Guyanese cannot do without, and that they themselves cannot do without?
Can we hear from you two gentlemen?

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