Now that is what I call leadership

Sep 12, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Don’t let’s go as far as India with Gandhi, South Africa with Mandela, Russia with Gorbachev and the US with Martin Luther King Jr. No need to go into the words of these great men. We can start with the US Ambassador, Mr. Brent Hardt, who left in July after completion of his tenure.
Hardt showed leadership in an address to Blue Caps. This group, like so many others before them, went around Guyana trying to teach the young generation about leadership. If you monitor all the speeches made by the Blue Caps hierarchy and their guests on the concept of leadership, conspicuously missing is the essential characteristic of leadership —- courage to speak out against evil.
If you go to Gandhi, Mandela and King, you would find volumes of quotes from them on what constitutes leadership. All of them tell you that cowardice is the opposite of leadership. I am not on Facebook, but was lucky enough to receive a plethora of Facebook postings of some of the Blue Caps leaders on a column I did on their leader, Mr. Clinton Urling. A friend known to all Guyanese for his dedicated courage sent them to my e-mail box.
I didn’t know that Mr. Clinton Urling’s deputy in the Blue Caps, Ms. Marissa Lowden, was a psychiatrist. I recall her being a student of mine at UG, and UG doesn’t offer a degree in psychiatry. Of course, Ms. Lowden must have followed up her UG degree with a graduate degree in psychiatry.
The famous Guyanese administrator, Earl B. John, who writes often in the letter pages of the two independent dailies, made a small mistake the other day. Mr. John noticed that Guyana may have too many lawyers. The profession that Guyana has too many of, is psychiatry.
Some well known psychiatrists are Ravi Dev, the fake pollster and Annan Boodram, the latter two of ‘Little Berbice’ in Richmond Hill, New York. All three of these gentlemen, have examined my thoughts, and have publicly stated in the letter columns of the Chronicle (not the Kaieteur News and Stabroek News) that I am mentally insane.
Now a young lady, the deputy of Mr. Clinton Urling in the Blue Caps, Marissa Lowden, has taken to Facebook to declare that I am mentally insane. Is that leadership?
Mr. Hardt’s address to the Blue Caps on the exigency of local government elections is leadership, but we will come back to Mr. Hardt and the definition of leadership.
A very respected and popular letter-writer replied to Lowden’s Facebook posting and asked her to deal with the contents of my column rather than my mind. Now I don’t know what Blue Caps mean by leadership, but to criticize a columnist by calling him insane because he took an insightful look at the lack of leadership qualities of the Blue Caps’ head is certainly not the stuff leadership is made of.
Interesting for readers to note – Lowden openly said on Facebook that I was insane; she has not found any governmental leader to be equally mad; look at the crazy things they do. The definition of leadership includes integrity.
Just to recap what I said in that column. I took Mr. Urling to task for shutting his mouth when he was chairman of the Chamber of Commerce on the government-created disasters in his country, but now that he has demitted office, he has found his voice. I described him as a little Ralph Ramkarran and Henry Jeffrey. I went on to paint Mr. Urling as someone who is a convenient critic.
The question is; am I right? Urling himself has proven me right. Of all the things he felt he should courageously speak against in public is what he called the PNC mistreatment of Vanessa Kissoon. Urling plays it safe. That is what I said in that column.
The defiance is directed to the opposition, but Mr. Urling is still to find the valour inside himself to openly confront the PPP Government on its mountains of violations. Urling is not going to do it. He is not going to be that brave and principled.
Lowden isn’t going to call any PPP leader insane, despite the insane things they do. She is going to play it safe.
It was ironic that at the climax of the Blue Caps’ training seminar on leadership, the US Ambassador got up and directly addressed an egregious situation in Guyana – the presidency’s defiance of the Constitution in not holding local government elections. Now that is what I call leadership.

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Now that is what I call leadership

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