Which do you prefer: Stealing books or serving a dictatorship?

Jan 24, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In two consecutive letters in this newspaper in a period of one week, former PPP –Civic Minister, Henry Jeffrey derogates my intellectual ability.
Yesterday he observed that I quote from authors whose work I read and many of the concepts I use on this page I don’t understand. It is obvious to Jeffrey that I failed in the three universities I attended (including two of the best in the world). I would have lost some sleepless nights if the great Guyanese with whom I enjoy a good relationship would have written that about me. But not Henry Jeffrey, a failed politician.
Before I reply to Jeffrey’e letter yesterday, “Freddie Kissoon seeks refuge in a redefinition of oligarchy,” I must say if Jeffrey does comprehend the works of the authors he has read and the concepts he uses, it hasn’t done him much intellectual, social and political good and it hasn’t guided his praxis at all – he ended up serving for seventeen years the most authoritarian and morally questionable government in the English speaking Caribbean.
This regime has made the Forbes Burnham and Eric Gairy juntas look like boys scout jamboree. Someone recently remarked about Jeffrey that the only politics he understands is dictatorship – he served in the Burnham Government then spent seventeen years with the PPP cabal.
Mr. Jeffrey went onto a new direction yesterday. After confessing on this page that as a sixteen year old youth I stole books when I worked at the Michael Forde Bookstore at Freedom House, Jeffrey dubs that action unlawful. I am sure in the conventional sense of the term it is. But when you deconstruct what “unlawful” means I wonder if Jeffrey’s seventeen years in the PPP Government would not make him guiltier than me. Of course I run the risk of invoking Jeffrey’s anger once more with his renewed claim that I don’t know about the concepts I use and the authors I read. “Deconstruction” is an epistemological methodology introduced into philosophy by the French thinker, Jacques Derrida.
I guess Jeffrey would say that digesting Derrida is beyond me. I just can’t help thinking why Jeffrey didn’t put all that knowledge to work to bring greater freedoms to Guyana. First, Burnham, then Jagdeo. Jeffrey certainly chooses the wrong company. I wonder what Navin Chandarpal would say to this since he is accusing Mr. Jagdeo of having the Burnham syndrome.
So who is unlawful or what is an unlawful act? Is stealing books from your workplace unlawful? Without resorting to Derrida, let us agree that it is. But by what epistemological logic can we exclude participation in a government that for seventeen years has committed some pretty nasty violations not only of the laws but the constitution and moral codes of the country.
The list is long indeed but many people would include in their enumeration, pathological corruption that puts Guyana on par with the terrible balance sheets of places like Mexico, Nigeria etc. The macabre, sinister, nocturnal forces between 2002 -2005, in which over 200 persons lost their lives in what is now called the Roger Khan era or alternatively the reign of the extra-judicial forces. All Guyanese want to know who killed the Lindo Creek miners and who was behind the murder of Ronald Waddell. Maybe we can stop there and come to an intriguing quote from Jeffrey.
Responding to me in the Jan 18th edition of KN, he exclaimed. “I have no intention of discussing government business in the press…” It is alright to scandalize Frederick Kissoon in the press but to tell the Guyanese people what happened the past seventeen years when he served the PPP Government including eleven years with Mr. Jagdeo, Henry Jeffrey has no intention of doing so. But can he ever do so without others attributing the label of “unlawful” that he gave to me in his missive yesterday?
Now here is the juicy part. In that same letter Jeffrey noted “The President offered me an ambassadorial position to Suriname…I made some additions to the normal conditions, was told that they could not be accepted …” So if they were agreed to by Mr. Jagdeo, Jeffrey would still have been serving the man that Navin Chadarpal wrote last week is stricken with the Burnham syndrome. Is this the man who is telling me that as a sixteen year old who stole a book that my action was unlawful? I prefer to steal books and educate myself rather than serve a government that is a cruel dictatorship.

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