There should be no sacred cows

Jan 08, 2012 Features / Columnists, My Column

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The Christmas season is over and it is back to the treadmill. There was some unfinished business from the past year and it is my hope that we get such businesses over in a hurry. One of them has to do with the sitting of the National Assembly. For those who take little interest in this, the national Assembly would kick off with an address to parliament.
A few months ago, President Donald Ramotar was sitting in the benches listening to a presidential address to the body. Now he has to make that address. And to crown it all, it signals his departure from the national Assembly for at least five years.
People are waiting for his determination of how the House would proceeds with its business. For one, we can expect regular sittings for business other than passing legislation and Bills. I expect there to be an examination of some of the things that the nation pondered over toward the latter months of last year.
I know about the queries, about the exposes and of course, the allegations of corruption. For reasons best known to the society, Kaieteur News spearheaded investigations into a number of issues and became labeled as the ‘new opposition’.
This was an unfortunate label because in any country where the media are the real watchdogs of the society, they unearth things that the opposition failed to. A few decades two reporters attached to the Washington Post unearthed the Watergate Scandal. The Washington Post was never considered the new opposition. Instead, it was hailed by the society and remains, today, one of the leading newspapers in the United States.
There were bumps in the road for that newspaper but that did not mean that it was bent on destroying Governments. It published an erroneous report on a non-existent eight-year-old drug addict. It rode out that storm because its structure is such that blame is correctly apportioned. No one attacked the publishers. They concentrated on the reporter in particular and on the responsible editorial section in general.
In Guyana, perhaps because of the nature of the society, people zero in on the publisher and its editor in chief. The focus on the latter could be understood, but why the publisher? As some would say; only in Guyana.
And this brings me to an episode that is dominating conversations. It deals with the publication of photographs of the home of Minister Irfaan Ali. Just this past week there was a story of the ex-wife of golf star Tiger Woods bulldozing a beautiful US$12 million mansion shortly after she bought it. I have not heard any accusation of mischief-making.
News is about the unusual; it is about people and newspapers are about news. I remember just a few days ago asking Cabinet Secretary Dr Roger Luncheon to tell me what was wrong with publishing the photograph of a Minister’s house.
I told him about the publication of a photograph of my house on the internet and the issue of an official statement from the Office of the President that I had some 10,000 laptops in my home. Not only was that mischievous, but also a direct threat to my security given the nature of the society. Fortunately, people did not believe.
Dr Luncheon’s simple answer to me was that I was not a Minister.  What does that have to do with anything? I have seen reports on properties owned by Members of the United States Congress, of Ministers in the British Government and even of properties owned by the hierarchy in the Russian administration. No one claimed mischief in any of those countries.
I firmly believe that there are no sacred cows and that people who hold public office should be open to scrutiny. Officials must be made to answer for anything unusual in their lives. Guyana should be no different.
Kaieteur News is going to defend most vigorously this libel suit. It is also going to move to have any injunction speedily withdrawn. It did the same when Kwame McCoy moved to the courts to hide disclosures of his private life.
Suffice it to say that Minister Ali had huge support. I saw the letters in the press. I wonder at the silence when Kaieteur News published photographs of the $60 million house bought by the wife of Lionel Wordsworth. We questioned the source of the money just as we did in Minister Ali’s case.  Perhaps Wordsworth is not a Minister so he falls outside the pale.
Someone sent to my e-mail something called the special national anthem. “Dear land of Guyana I built a mansion by the sea; how did I get it? By sheer skullduggery. Every month I will suck 3 million from the treasury, because I’m the king, the Kong, the dictator & bully
Green land of Guyana; I will leave you in the hands of Donald; he will continue all business as usual. Corruption and exclusion will be the order of the day; if you don’t like it you can run to the USA.”
This is what people believe and they are not silent. Thank God for the social networks. One note, I don’t believe that ‘Donald’ will continue business as usual. So I end where I began by waiting for his address to the parliament in a few days.

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