Latest update September 3rd, 2026 10:25 AM
President Jagdeo and professionalism
Dear Editor,
When I read with astonishment the Adam Harris’s column in your newspaper, under the caption: “Jagdeo hates professionalism”, I felt duty-bound, as a professional journalist, trained at the PPP Mirror newspaper, under the illustrious Janet Jagan, and then at the London School of Journalism, in the UK, to defend him.
He is a person of outstanding quality and distinction that we sometimes take for granted. We must step back sometimes and reflect on those people who take great risks to their health and welfare to bring the news and information to our doorstep. Adam is one of them.
Adam is, perhaps, one of the friendliest persons in this field of work that I have so far met on my return to Guyana. There has been very few times when I phoned him that I could not get through.
He was always friendly and extraordinarily courteous. I have don’t think we see eye to eye on many things, but we have learnt over the period of three years – how to work with each other.
Like Adam, I am what I am and no one can change that. I grew up in a home where politics determined the next move. It was a training ground – better than any university in the world. I sincerely grateful to my parents and the rest of my family for the active guidance they offered me and the iron-discipline that became part our family heritage.
The Jagans were a household name and it was not surprising that we held leading positions in the PPP, perhaps among the few people that worked in every area of party life.
Politics have always been a “dirty game”, many people believe. I don’t take that view. People use it for their personal ends. It does not have to be that way. After-all it is the art of running governments – like it or lump it.
Kaieteur News and the SN are organs that have always been in the centre of such politics. At Kaieteur News, Adam is always caught in the middle, as he has admitted. He does he is damn, and if does not do – he is damned – so to hell, he may say.
On my return to Guyana, I had decided that I was not going to stay in an office, as I did in London, but engage in agriculture and in some form of writing. I did approach Kaieteur News following my active involvement in the rice industry to do some freelance work. Adam was encouraging, but cautious for reasons that I still would like to know from the “horse’s mouth”.
As time progressed I began to re-acquaint myself with the local politics and found to my surprise things and individuals have changed drastically. People whom I had worked with for many decades were not the same persons I knew. But Adam gave me a few hints and as an experienced community and political activist, I learned quickly.
He is always willing to help his fellow journalists to report the facts and not fiction.
I would not blame him for the style and some of the bad reporting in his newspaper. I worked once with the owner of a British newspaper, who happened to be Guyanese. When I met Glen Lall for the first time I could not help but remember, Mr. Arif Ali, the proprietor of Caribbean, Asian and African Times.
There are so much in common with these two men that would be inappropriate to go into now. They were not themselves journalists.
They cannot write to save their names, but know how important it is to get the story twisted in a way that pleases or displeases certain people in public life.
I mentioned the above to make one salient point, don’t blame Mr. Harris for unprofessionalism, he is only the messenger.
Mr. Jagdeo must look to blame the organ-grinder, not the monkey for any undue or unpleasant exposures. But Mr. Jagdeo is after all from the “Stalin School of Falsification”, what else could one expect?
Jinnah Rahman
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