Latest update September 13th, 2026 10:36 AM
A week of incredible politics
For the purpose of this column, I will include last Sunday as part of last week. The week began with Mr. Robeson Benn uttering an amazing statement. If Benn was a Minister from one of the powerful countries of the world, that utterance would have made headlines in both the print and electronic media.
Mr. Benn has been accused of being responsible for the police detention of a citizen in an incident that occurred at Parika. It was alleged that the citizen, Andrew Stone, a member of the protest group that started last August, The People’s Parliament, heckled the Minister.
This newspaper reported that when it solicited an explanation, Mr. Benn indicated that since he was directly involved, it would be best for the Kaieteur News to extract a description from those who were present.
I once told Dr. David Hinds that there is no other country like Guyana and if Guyana was a Jamaica or Singapore, because of its bizarre political deportment, scholars from around the world would have written about it in all the top class social sciences journals. It is my opinion that only in Guyana you would get a response like the one Benn gave this newspaper.
The story of Robeson Benn and Kellawan Lall paints a tragic analysis of Guyana. And the tragedy lies in its people. How can a political party go to the electorate and ask for votes when that party has among its midst politicians whose controversies are literally non-ending. And that party is the organization that is in power, meaning then someone has to say, “Stop it, you are damaging the party’s image.”
Months ago Mr. Benn was involved in an incident. It was alleged that he went to NCN to stop a calypso from being aired. In any normal country, the Minister, annoyed at what he heard, would have contacted the subject Minister. That is the way it was done in the past and will always be done. The least said about Mr. Lall the better.
Let’s continue with the week gone by. Mr. Clement Rohee calls for a monitoring committee to investigate the behaviour of the private media. The least said about this monstrosity of an idea the better. Why is this a monstrosity? Because in the comparison of the state media under the PNC Government and the PPP regime since 1992, the PNC rulers appear as angels compared to the sickening use of the state media by the PPP leadership.
It was Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine who said that in Guyana there is far more caricatured (my word) domination of the state media than in Zimbabwe.
One wonders what went through the mind of Mr. Rohee when he opened last Sunday edition of this newspaper and saw that the lead letter was written by the Minister of Education. It was a long tale in support of the PPP Government. Then in the same edition, the Minister was the Special Person of the Week. This entire country knows that there is no way the Chronicle would carry a similar missive by a leading spokesperson for the opposition. It is unthinkable that the Chronicle would feature an opposition politician as the personality of the week.
One is curious to know what went through the mind of the Minister of Education. Just two weeks ago, she shared the podium with her PPP colleagues at Lusignan to celebrate the PPP’s 21 years in power. The Stabroek News and Kaieteur News had scorn poured on them by every speaker. The same Minister agreed to be the Kaieteur News’s Special Person. By extension she has acknowledged that the newspaper is a credible media. So what was the denunciation at Lusignan all about? Maybe Rohee should ask her.
Finally, two intriguing developments last week; one reminds us of the mess Guyana is in; the other, a subtle hint from a friend of the Government that corruption is indeed a monster.
There was Roger Luncheon referring to the possibility of arrest for school children and their parents who like to protest. Nothing about the nature of dictatorship should shock the mind. But Luncheon, though he is not right to say what he uttered, he knows he can say it because Guyana has become a nation of sheep.
The other one was the absence of the Private Sector Commission (PSC) during the OAS hearing into corruption. Readers were told that the personnel of the PSC were either out of the country or too busy to attend. Or it is that they didn’t have the stomach to publicly defend corruption?
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