The white man left us with some democratic values

Jul 27, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The nonsense, ignorance and utter disregard for sacred principles that come out of the mouths of Ministers of the Government go on relentlessly. It is a downright shame. Most definitely, our Ministers need to be less mediocre in their proclamation of their conceptualizations. It makes Guyana look stupid in the eyes of the world.
The unions at UG, through APNU on Wednesday, have tabled a petition to Parliament to change the structure of the Council of the University. The unions want more professional persons to make policies rather than the school of political appointees from the Government that at present obtains.
Demerara Waves quoted the Education Minister’s reaction to the petition. She cautioned against objecting to persons with certain political persuasion being members of the UG Council because, as the Minister went on to state, such people are entitled to the right to freedom of association.
If this is not ignorance coming from a Minister, then surely civilization is lost in Guyana. For all the years she has lived in this world, Priya Manickchand must know that judges have lost their right to associate with certain sections of society and that curtailment occurred a long time ago, and can be found in most countries in the world.
Not only is a judge expected not to be a member of a political party, but if he/she was at the time of appointment, that judge would have to resign. The world has come to accept that it is morally unacceptable for a judge to be involved in politics. Maybe there are exceptions that only Manickchand knows about.
It does not end there. The Minister foolishly confuses the right to associate with the legal privilege to make policies for a country. How can the two be the same? They are not related at all. The convicted child molester has a right after he would have served his sentence to join a cricket club. He certainly should not be given the legal mandate to be the headmaster of a children’s play group. The difference here is the right to associate and the right to make decisions.
Surely Manickchand ought to know the difference. If she doesn’t, she may end up like Rohee, with a parliamentary vote of no confidence against her.
In the UG Council at the moment there are nine members who belong to PPP groups; four are PPP parliamentarians—-Gail Teixeira, Bibi Shadick, Indra Chandarpal and Dharamkumar Seeraj. The five PPP members are Prem Misir, Phulandar Khandai, Nirmal Rehka, Dr. Gancham Singh and Berbician attorney Annamaya who was a PPP candidate in the last election.
These people sit in the UG Council, not to associate with each other as the Minister mistakenly believes, but to make policies for the country’s only university. The petition in Parliament is not to prevent these nine persons from associating with others at UG, but to ensure that the Council comprises persons who would not inject political bias into their decisions or be influenced by party considerations or to attend Council meetings just to vote along party lines.
The horrible fact of life in this country the past forty years is that the administration of the affairs of Guyana has been in the hands of persons who put their political party and their political preferences in front of the nationalist love for country. It has led to the ruin of a wealthy territory that has gone nowhere since then, and is going nowhere under the power crazy directorate we have.
I will expand on this obsession with power in a future column by looking at the bypassing of the POO series for vehicles. The licence plates at the moment carry the PPP series.
The white man colonized us, but when he packed up, there were some priceless values he left with us. He gave us the concept of the neutral civil servant. We destroyed that. Under Bharrat Jagdeo, three Permanent Secretaries belonged to the ruling party. Of course it went back over fifty years ago when Dr. Jagan demoted his Permanent Secretary and secured the position for a party member, a high school teacher.
President Burnham invented the paramountcy of the party, which Mr. Jagdeo perfected. Now, in 2012, an Education Minister sees nothing wrong with nine members of her party making policies at the University of Guyana She calls it the right to associate.

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