Vulture to Carrion Crow: “Keep looking at them, man!”

Oct 12, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The President referred to the private media as vultures and carrion crows. The place was the Kitty circus last Sunday when the PPP had its Georgetown rally for the upcoming national election. The rallies are becoming a huge spectacle of embarrassment. At each meeting, the politics is merged with entertainment.
Trust me! I am the last person in the world to make a negative comment on people’s aesthetic choices. Aesthetic choices lie in one’s culture, race and religion. And those are lines you do not cross. But when you see those gyrating bodies on stage, you wonder if these PPP meetings have not descended to a big circus.
Two weeks ago, someone used his cell phone and took a photograph of President Medvedev of Russia dancing. The moves were so awkward and amusing that soon after, it appeared on YouTube for the world to see. I saw it on my computer. Russian television had a field day with Medvedev’s style. I cannot dance at all, so I would not have done what Medvedev did, because you run the risk of people laughing at you. And the joke was on the Russian President for the world to see.
After the bodies twisted and gyrated last Sunday at Kitty (now how can the President refer to Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine as a fossil after seeing those dancing bodies on stage?), it was time for political deception. President Jagdeo reserved the irrational part of his anger for the private media. It was the cuss-down style that has characterized the deportment of this tragic politician. Mr. Jagdeo has not publicly said it, but the Guyanese people know it – he sees the private media as his nemesis.
There is only one reason why this happened. After the combined opposition became muted, the private media stood in the way of Mr. Jagdeo’s relentless pursuit of a lasting legacy. The President himself referred to the private media (this writer here has not included the Guyana Times in the category of the private media – the Kaieteur News claims that the Guyana Times has ownership that reaches into the heart of political power; it must know what it is talking about) as the new opposition.
Looked at from any angle by the analyst, this presidential exclamation means the following in the minds of the little dictators – what the opposition should be doing to keep government in check, the private media has taken on that role. This is where the anger comes in.
The dictators felt that the private media had no business in the role of exposing. Their job is to report. Herein lie the pent-up emotions against Kaieteur News, Stabroek News, Prime News, Capitol News and Demerara Waves.com, and Vieira’s television before it was sold.
The damning question that tantalizes the power-wielders is why in the absence of opposition activism, the media should get into the business of pressuring the government.
In exposing corruption, racial discrimination, abuse of power and undemocratic policy-making, the private media has destroyed in totality the legacy Mr. Jagdeo wanted to shape for himself.
A legacy, far from containing truths and objective facts, is replete with deceptions of nation-building. The Government of Guyana has had an ongoing relationship with the Guyanese version of the Jamaican drug lord, Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke. This has been brought to light by the media. The Guyana Government from 1999 to the present is the most corrupt regime the Independent British West Indies has experienced.
The Kaieteur News has stood out in the journalism of crusade in bringing this depravity to the nation.
Let us leave aside corruption and drug-trafficking, this government has engaged in more naked abuse of power than the two black sheep in the history of the CARICOM region – Eric Gairy in Grenada and Forbes Burnham in Guyana.
Not even Burnham contemplated doing away with trial by jury. Today, you can languish in jail without bail for murder, face a judge and jury and be eventually acquitted only to be returned to jail until the State’s appeal is heard.
It is the reporting by the media of this kind of fascist behaviour by an out-of-control government that has earned the private media the wrath of Mr. Jagdeo. The regime’s leaders just don’t seem to care. By some weird, psychic contortion inside the mind of the chief policy-makers, the media’s role is to pay homage to them because they are the people in charge.
Cussing down of the private media, calling us names like vultures and carrion crows will not deter us. We will continue to look, report and expose.

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Vulture to Carrion Crow: “Keep looking at them, man!”

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