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There is no excuse for that unpatriotic advertisement
Dear Editor,
There have been two comments in Kaieteur News about that advertisement advising investors not to invest in Guyana that bother me. One was a comment by the publisher of KN, asking or questioning a letter which called the ad “unpatriotic”, by asking if the ad did not represent “freedom of expression”. To which my reply was, yes it was “freedom of expression”. But “freedom of expression” also covered the letter writer and my and many other people’s right to deem it unpatriotic.
The other comment was by your columnist Peeping Tom, who stated that “A call for investors to go elsewhere cannot be deemed unpatriotic”. One argument (I call it an excuse) offered by Peeping Tom is that there are still socialists in our midst who see foreign private investment as a form of robbery of poor states by rich capitalist states.
Well, certainly powerful states have in the past robbed weaker states, and also undoubtedly they still do so today. However, those of us who deem the ad unpatriotic are not all socialists. And I may be wrong, but I do not think that socialism versus capitalism was the theme of that advertisement.
On the contrary, I think that the basis of the ad was and is the extreme partisan politics that exists in Guyana.
Peeping Tom defends the ad on the grounds that there is corruption in Guyana, and this could also be a motivation for the advertisement: that it was warning investors to avoid investing in this corrupt country.
Well, I have never noticed that investors have ever sought to avoid corrupt states; rather they seem to seek to use that corruption to their own advantage, but that’s another story.
However, I would have thought that if this is the real concern of the producer of the advertisement, the individual/s concerned would be establishing community organizations to expose and fight that corruption.
There is NO country that I have heard of in which NO corruption exists. But there are courageous citizens, newspaper publishers, journalists, etc., who stand up to expose the corruption wherever it occurs, and who fight against it. (Just look at the recent case of the sports doctor whose molestation of young athletes was exposed by newspaper journalists, after more than twenty years of the concerned organizations covering up the issue).
In Guyana, on the other hand, with a few notable exceptions (Freddie Kissoon springs to mind), we all too often take a political attitude that if “is dem doing it”, then it’s corruption, but if “is we doing it”, then it is okay. There is no way we can get rid of corruption until we are prepared to expose and condemn it wherever and whenever it occurs.
Telling investors not to invest here will not cure the evil of corruption. (On the contrary, it will rather encourage the curse to continue; poverty and limited opportunities facilitate corruption because those who have few avenues to improve their lot are not likely to be willing to jeopardize what little they have by opposing those in power.)
I cannot speak for the other citizens who have condemned this ad as being unpatriotic. But I do not think that the motivation for the ad was concern for the pockets or the moral well-being of prospective investors. I think that it was sheer political malevolence. Back to “is dem doing dis”.
I do not think that had the oil project reached this stage during the present opposition’s time in power, whoever produced this ad would have done so; all would have been well, corruption or no corruption. And don’t get me wrong. I recognize that this is not something specific to supporters of the current opposition.
There are supporters of the present government with exactly the same attitude. And we will get nowhere as a people until we recognize that this is indeed unpatriotic.
Stop making excuses for the perpetrators, and get down to the hard and sometimes unrewarding task of building a better society.
Pat Robinson Commissiong
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