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Aug 20, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
It would be an enormous learning experience to get inside the head of people like Rickey Singh, Dr. Compton Bourne (recipient of Guyana’s Order of Excellence and former CEO of the Caribbean Development Bank), Muslim priest, Fazeel Feroze, the head of the Central Islamic Organization of Guyana (CIOG), Dr. David Dabydeen, Professor Clement Sankat of UWI, just to name a few
Surely, there must be a moral limit that all humans place on a government they support and the belief is that this limit should not be exceeded. Of the names mentioned here, the most infamous one must be Rickey Singh. Singh has spent a lifetime derogating former President Forbes Burnham and his PNC Government.
What is wrong with that? Well, they say who feels it, knows it. Singh will probably argue that he was victimized by President Burnham and saw other Guyanese oppressed by Mr. Burnham, so he believes that the recording of history should go on. It is difficult to deny Singh his conceptual framework. But his logics, desire to record history, and his ethics go out the window when in the same breath, he supports leaders and governments in Guyana that have done worse than Mr. Burnham.
A simple analogy is relevant. You stole my car and therefore I will continue to tell people not to trust you as a mechanic, because I left my car in your workshop and you stole it. It so happens I have a brother who gives me money from the sale of cars he pilfers from his customers. I have no credibility to criticize you, because my brother and you are made from the same dirty, thieving cloth.
This is my moral revulsion of people like Rickey Singh. The Burnham regime had far more urbaneness, moral standing, etiquette and basic human decency than the PPP regime from 1999 to the present time. How can Rickey Singh support a government whose leaders abuse their wives, go down to the level of the gutter, and have no manners whatsoever?
And these people have the gall to vilify Forbes Burnham. This columnist lived under Mr. Burnham’s rule and I say unapologetically, never would Mr. Burnham verbally abuse his wife so openly in public as Mr. Jagdeo did. When you look at the distastefulness of the PPP Government from 1999 onwards, surely, they have crossed that moral line. How can people like the names mentioned above have anything to do with the Jagdeo presidency and the members of his political entourage who have been carried over into the Ramotar presidency?
There is the Jagdeo wife incident and also the horrible case of a Cabinet Minister telling the nation by way of his press conference, “When I hear de press talking about a Minister who does illegal things, I thought ya’ll referring to this minister, because I is a man who like to do illegal tings.” This is one of the numbest moments for me in politics and this reference to it here is perhaps the sixth time I have mentioned it in my columns.
Take Charles Ramson (see my last Friday column). This man was a former Minister of Legal Affairs and a Court of Appeal judge. He presently holds a highly important public office, the kind reserved for former high-level judges as in the case of the office of the Ombudsman. He is the Commissioner of Information created out of the Freedom of Information Act.
In refusing the request for a certain public document from the local chapter of Transparency International, Mr. Justice Ramson in his response explained that the opposition cut the allocation to his office in the 2014 budget (which the government restored in May of this year) and therefore his office cannot function.
Then in the same letter he resorted to a sexual innuendo by quoting from a Mighty Sparrow calypso in which a man wanted sex, but the woman told him he had to pay first for it. She told him in the calypso, “No money, no love.” Where was the relevance of that calypso quote? Simply put, Justice Ramson had descended to a highly unbecoming level.
It is shocking that Justice Ramson, given the nature of his public office and his background of a former Court of Appeal judge, would resort to that kind of analogy. And not in a private e-mail, but in an open letter to one of Guyana’s most eminent human rights bodies, Transparency Institute. This is the kind of behaviour that characterizes the PPP in government. How can any decent citizen support such miasmic outpouring in the function of government?
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