In the church of the poisoned mind

Dec 19, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

We cannot escape the daily sermon. This is the reality of Guyana. A political party that had been in power for twenty-three years and under whose rule the society had become a failed state, lost power in 2015, and we who live here have to be witness to a daily dose of morbid hypocrisy, twisted double standards and poisonous pretence of goodwill.
Inside the church of the depraved, virulent, mind-boggling, irredeemable sermon, Guyanese people have to stomach the poison. It was on display last week and its star was Juan Edghill.
Edghill refused to take his seat when the Speaker ruled his behaviour as vulgar and ugly (my words not the Speaker’s). What was his complaint? He wanted more time to speak.
I recall the times in the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC) when I was asked by the TUC to represent labour in several forums sponsored by the ERC, of which Edghill was the chairman.
At one session, Edghill refused to answer my question and threatened me with removal if I didn’t take my seat. This same Edghill postures as a paragon of democratic politics.
Please permit me to repeat in these columns that Edghill, through his attorney, Ashton Chase (will be doing an interview with Chase’s former wife, Audrey, in which she said there will be hair-raising revelations) tried to send me to jail for contempt of court. What Edghill sued me for is a drop in the ocean to what Edghill did to the Speaker of the National Assembly. If the court had found me guilty of contempt, prison was mandatory. Edghill did worse and got a mere four days suspension.
There is more to this man’s authoritarian instincts, that when they are revealed, you feel that he should be expelled from Parliament along with his philistine ignoramuses who despoiled Parliament last week in front of the world.
Here are more revelations of the man who stood up in Parliament claiming that the Guyanese people need to have information about their country, but when he and his fellows plebeians were in power, contempt for Guyanese ran so deep that it touched the bottom of our northern neighbour – the Atlantic.
The UNDP funded a project headed by Lawrence Latchmansingh (a man the President did not find to be fit and proper to be the Chairman of the Elections Commission; he was on one of Jagdeo’s three lists) to ascertain how the society feels about the ERC, its objectivity, its integrity etc. After the report was handed in, Edghill refused to accede to my request, and that of Norris Witter of the TUC, to read the document.
This was not only crass nonsense, but authoritarian bullyism. The TUC was a legal part of the ERC, with its representative being a commissioner. The paper was an ERC document, not Edghill’s personal notebook. I contacted the UNDP’s local officer, Trevor Benn, who told me the UNDP was not in receipt of the study. I would have thought that Latchmansingh, by legal obligation, would have had to submit a copy to the UNDP. I found Benn’s response strange, but I had no reason at the time to question his integrity.
Years after, I secured a copy of Latchmansingh’s study, and it painted a most unflattering portrait of Juan Edghill as Chairman of the ERC. The research concluded that Edghill used and treated the ERC as his personal property. Some of the conclusions included the observation that the Guyanese people did not see Edghill as a fair-mined and objective chairman, but that he acted in partisan ways to the government of the day, thus eroding confidence in the work of the ERC.
The Guyanese people turned out to be right about Edghill when Latchmansingh interviewed them for the UNDP study. Years later, the same Edghill turned up as an election candidate for the PPP and said if Jesus was a Guyanese, he would have voted for the PPP. This is the same Edghill that purports to be a man of the cloth and uses the appellation “Bishop” in front of his name (which kind of cloth, there are several types of cloth and which kind of bishop, there are several kinds of such people too).
This is the same Edghill that told the nation, when he was ordered to take his seat, that he is in Parliament to provide the Guyanese people with information (there are all kinds of information including alternative facts and fake news). This is the same Edghill that PPP parliamentarians confronted and assaulted police officials for, because he was ordered out of the House. This is the same Edghill that is posing as a democrat.

1 thoughts on “In the church of the poisoned mind”

Juan Allicock December 19, 2017 at 11:25 am

Now you should be fighting the same injustices of the new regime not making comparisons with bad behavior. Corruption ,oppression, whatever goes against your holy grail as an activist for every thing “good”. APNU bad actions cannot be better than the PPP’s.