Public figures, the media and the creation of historical knowledge

Jun 29, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

People do not like to be criticized. Guyanese public figures are not alone in this attitude. Maybe it is human nature.
We in the media have to draw a line between public figures and their private lives. But there are times when the public and the private become intertwined based on the particular human being involved.
Jon Snow, a British news anchor, two days ago, told the UK Leveson Inquiry, investigating hacking by the Murdoch media empire that the personal lives of citizens should not be touched by the media.
But Snow went on to say that it is certainly news if the Archbishop of Canterbury was seen frequenting a place where women of the night are the only inhabitants.
I have never resented the plethora of commentary on me, some of which are vile and nasty.
Opinion-makers have to expect that. I never sought refuge in the libel laws. I just accept that it comes with the territory.
I created media history in this country. No one has ever had over two hundred letters written about him in one calendar year in the letter pages of any newspaper anywhere in the world.
In one year I counted over two hundred and fifty condemnations of me in the Chronicle. The other day I made a simple mistake in identifying a year. That brought a response from someone in the form of a long letter analyzing my character because I confused a date. The letter writer said that there was a deeper meaning when I penned the wrong date.
He claimed it was deliberate. I cannot even make a genuine mistake, something all human beings have done since civilization began.
Since 1988, when I began writing (first in the Stabroek News), I have been resented for the direct assessments I have made by those whose power or status was the subject of my analyses. Today, I will look at two large personalities in terms of the influence they once exerted upon this society.
A letter writer in KN opined last Sunday that I should ignore the years Mr. Ralph Ramkarran has been with the PPP and did nothing to change the PPP, but that I should accept that he has condemned corruption and respect what he has done.
That still leaves the debate alive as to why a political analyst cannot question the silence of someone who has been in the PPP’s leadership for over thirty-five years.
Mr. Ramkarran became a member of the Central Committee of the PPP in the late seventies. Then since the PPP got power in 1992, he has been in the crucial section of the party referred to as the executive committee.
Mr. Ramkarran then by extension was a powerful person, because he was part of the biology of the organization that was in control of Guyana.
It is legitimate for an academic and social analyst to probe the politics of a senior official who chose to speak out against some wrongs his party has done while in government after decades of reticence. This is called adding to the body of historical knowledge of a country and a society should encourage such thinking and writing.
When it comes to Mr. Ramkarran, there is this curiosity if not fascination by scholars as to why such a person waited after twenty years in the exercise of power to pinpoint a serious moral depravity in the government of his party.
This of course comes into play by the very fact that the person chose to talk about it after twenty years.
The identical situation surrounds the politics of Henry Jeffrey. It is perfectly valid to inquire into the state of mind of a politician who spent seventeen years as a senior Minister with the PPP Government and now pens some scathing comments and acerbic opinions of the failings of a government that he served not for seventeen days, seventeen months or seven years, but seventeen years.
Surely, the intellectual community of Guyana is shamelessly abandoning its obligation to the accumulation of historical knowledge by not putting some intellectual debate on the accomplishments of this gentleman when he was a senior Cabinet Minister.
The obvious curiosity revolves around such question as to what specific blueprints did he have for changing his government so it could have been less authoritarian and more democratic.
Did he submit his paradigms and why were they not accepted? Did he fight within his government for pursuing alternative forms of governance? I don’t think anyone can seriously deny that these are questions pertinent to understanding modern Guyana and Dr. Jeffrey has an obligation to answer them.

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Public figures, the media and the creation of historical knowledge

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