We must as a matter of justice reply to Minister Manickchand

Oct 20, 2013 Letters

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Dear Editor,
I entered the supermarket with my wife on Friday, and a senior employee came up to me and in a tone of disbelief asked me if I read what was said about a leading media personality in a pro-PPP newspaper that I honestly do not read. I said no, and she went and got the newspaper for me
When pro-government supporters pen their propaganda, we may think that Guyanese people will dismiss it knowing that it is the usual fluff from those who benefit from the Government. That may be so but I have always pontificated on the need for decent and critically thinking Guyanese to reply because there are minds out there that do not have an alternative interpretation and may believe the relentless fictions that the PPP Government puts out. My personal take on the issue is I do not reply to anonymous writers and the likes of Bisram and those of his ilk. But there are circumstances when we should
No better circumstance is Minister Manickchand’s letter in both independent dailies last week accusing Mr. Anand Goosarran of trying to deny the wife of the Finance Minister her job at the Auditor-General’s Office.  Four Red Thread activists – Dr. Alizza Trotz, Shirlena Najeer, Amndaiye and Karen De Souza –penned an appropriate reply and came up with a novel point – since the Minister’s wife is in a conflict of interest situation then the Minister himself should resign. What I thought was left out of the Red Thread analysis and that others should take up is the fact that the Government in which Manickchand holds a senior position has dismissed many women without even the slightest touch of legality
The latest was the case of young women (I think one was a single patent) fired from the Guyana Energy Authority for failing a lie detector test. There is no legal support for dismissing public sector employees for failing a polygraph. Manickchand’s voice was absent. Maybe these women were not middle class like Mrs. Singh, the Minister’s wife or Manickchand herself or maybe they do not belong to the same religious, ethnic and cultural background of Manickchand.
Manickchand may be unsettled by the fact that she herself may be cited for conflict of interest in that she is the boss of her mother who is Assistant Education Officer for Secondary Schools. Manickchand replied to Goolsarran because she felt it was in the interest of her party’s image to do. We on the other hand who know better, have an obligation to expose the implausible and propagandistic contents in the commentaries of people like Manickchand
What Minister Manickchand has done and believes she has gotten away with is that she extracted one dimension of the story of the Minister’s wife and made it into the main argument. This is not only silly but poor reasoning. The core of the employment is a conflict of interest not gender bias. By extension, if an Amerindian does a wrong and we speak out, are we targeting the Amerindian people
Ms. Manickchand hoped that by introducing male chauvinism into her attempt at being polemical, she saves the Minister’s wife and she completes a piece of competent PR for the authoritarian government she works for. In other words, she hopes to shut the mouth and break the pen of male critics by accusing us of picking on a woman. Justice and rights are not about race and gender. They are about just that –justice and rights. They are terrible Africans, Chinese, East Indians, priests, women in this world. What has that got to do with race and gender and religion?
I will leave the Minister with a fine piece of journalistic investigation by the newest newspaper in the world – the International New York Times (INYT) which has replaced the iconic International Herald Tribune. INYT found out that women comprise more than half of the membership of Neo-Nazi, far right groups in Germany. According to the gospel of Manickchand, we men should not adversely comment on that because we would be denying women their rightful place in politics. Never mind that such women kill innocent human beings and one of them, Beate Szchaepe, is currently on trial in Germany for multiple homicides in which the victims were non-white immigrants
Finally, the Minister should be the last to talk about people trying to deny the Minister’s wife the right to employment. This Minister’s Government has a track record of such denial of employment than any since self-government began in the fifties. Maybe Ms Manickchand may want to comment on the Genieve Whyte-Nedd travesty at the Ministry of Education which I think she is head of unless I am wrong.
Frederick Kissoon

 

 

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