Sports journalist, Edison Jefford pontificates

Jan 05, 2017 Letters

---

Dear Editor,
Please allow me to correct some basic, but perhaps deliberate, blunders, which led to misrepresentations, contained in a letter published on Tuesday January 3, 2016 titled “Freddie Kissoon owes K. Juman Yassin an apology”. Harri Narine Singh, the documented author of the letter, cart-wheeled downhill from his opening paragraph when he sought to assert that Freddie Kissoon was the “catalyst against Yassin’s election”. From that spiraling view, the entire perspective of his letter went in the wrong direction.
For the record, it was Rawle Welch who started the incision into the operations of the Guyana Olympic Association (G.O.A), which should have been a normal procedure as mandated under the tenets of Journalism, more so in an election year of a major national sports organisation. Kissoon and I followed. This is to debunk Singh’s stated belief that Welch and I were merely echoing a theory of Kissoon in our examination of the 20-plus year reign of Yassin as G.O.A President. It must be noted that Singh is only the third voice to publicly support Yassin.
The fact that more persons have not uttered a single line publicly to support Yassin speaks directly to the poor stakeholder confidence that surrounds his marathon run as G.O.A President, which again is in contravention to Singh’s belief that Yassin is revered in the sports community. Readers ought to be reminded that it was the Guyanese civil society that initiated any criticism of Yassin on the social media platform, Facebook when a collage of some of his many trips around the world was circulated following another medal-less sojourn for Guyana at the Olympic Games in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil in August last year.
But sycophants like Singh see no wrong in an official occupying an important post for over two decades without producing the results. It highlights the lethargy that exists in the development of sports in Guyana. I want to reiterate what our militancy has been about since it appears as though there are those who want to be distractive. Our position is that in 20-plus years of Yassin, he has not propelled the development of sports in Guyana in significant ways.
In 20-plus years of Yassin, he has not given Guyana any Olympic medals; in 20-plus years, Yassin has failed to support athletes tangible outside of the IOC Elite Athlete Grant; in those years, we do not know who were/are the beneficiaries of this IOC grant.
In 20-plus years we have not known when Yassin left Guyana on G.O.A business and for what purpose and with whom; we do not know how much has been expended to-date on the G.O.A Headquarters and we have no details on how much is the IOC Grant to Guyana. Maybe Singh could help us answer those questions since in his view Yassin has been the best performing sports administrator in the last decade. While it is normal for the media to put a national sports organisation responsible for Olympic sports under the microscope in an election year, we never attacked Yassin’s character, his magistracy, his legal profession etc. We simply analysed his long run at the helm of the G.O.A.
In other countries, Yassin would have been gone a long time ago because he would have had to produce results, but not in Guyana. For highlighting the non-performance of the G.O.A, Singh is asking for an apology from Freddie. What Singh left out of his letter is the sudden year-end benevolence of the G.O.A toward affiliated associations and why the local Olympic body is not accenting to the request of the sports shooting association for Archery to become a member when Baseball, which has question marks lingering over its Olympic status in Guyana, contested the Vice Presidency of the G.O.A.
What Singh didn’t tell us is why all of a sudden at the end of the year 2016, Yassin goes to the airport to receive a sport team when we have teams travelling year-round and tournaments being held that don’t even see the shadow of Yassin. For stating these facts in several investigative articles and following his unopposed re-election because no one else was interested in contesting the post, Yassin told sport associations and the media that we were disrespectful.
At that same forum he also promised a post-election press conference. To-date there has been no press conference, which continues to underline the general secrecy that surrounds the operations at the Olympic body. Singh mentions criminality ad hominem Cricket and Football. I will leave those officials from those disciplines to respond to that, but suffice it to say, we know how much the FIFA Grant to the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) is and how much the WICB gives to the Guyana Cricket Board. What we do not know is anyone’s guess!
Edison Jefford

---

---