A page in Comey’s book saddened me as a Guyanese

Apr 30, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

James Comey’s “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership” came into the country for me Saturday afternoon. I completed reading it around 11 PM. It is a different kind of American memoir. It also lacked what we anticipated and that is because of those very anticipations. Because of the controversy Comey found himself in readers’ thoughts that there would be riveting, maybe even salacious details of Trump’s leadership and White rumblings. This is not in the book.
We would be doing Comey a disservice if we compare his book to the memoirs of world famous American presidents and powerful politicians. Edward Kennedy’s autobiography (True Compass), I would say is far more engrossing (incidentally, Kennedy’s book has seven pages of photographs one being President Obama’s celebration of Kennedy’s birthday with Bill Cosby at the side of Obama).
Comey was never a politician but a man who dealt for most of his professional life with sensitive state information – district attorney in New York, Deputy Attorney-General under George Bush, then FBI director. His memoir then would be more cautious, more controlled, less detailed, less open.
What we thought would be a fierce exposure of the faults, flaws and flings of President Trump are not in the book. But it is good, interesting reading. There is a page (262) that caught my eyes and immediately I thought of my own country.
I will quote Comey; “I was in Los Angeles…to attend a Diversity Agent Recruiting event. This was an effort we had previously mounted…where we invited talented young lawyers, engineers, and business school graduates of colour to come listen to why they should take cuts in pay and become FBI special agents.
“I loved these events –which were in keeping with our quest to attract more minority agents and the two so far had been hugely successful. Diversifying the Bureau was the key to our sustained effectiveness.”
Any Guyanese reading those words of page 262 would both be angered and sad. In this country, since home rule was restored in 1957, successive governments have recruited state servants based on ethnic composition. Two factors explain this and it hasn’t changed since then.
One is that since governments are elected in Guyana by racially conscious voting, the victorious rulers patronize their ethnic constituencies throughout the country. No government from 1957 to 2018 has digressed from that pattern.
The second reason is that in ethnically divided Guyana where the two victorious parties enjoy racial support, fear of sabotage and professional disloyalty create a nagging paranoia in the rulers. They do not feel secure with important state positions being filled by people who they feel are not of the same race make up as they are.
What happens then is that recruitment is ethnically driven. Here is Comey again; “…high-potential blacks and Latino men and women thought of the FBI as “The Man.” Who would want to work for “the Man”? I loved these events because it gave me …the chance to show these talented people a bit more about what the “Man” and the woman of the FBI are really like…the yield from events in Washington and Houston had been successfully high. I was coming to L.A. to speak to more than five hundred potential new agents.”
For all the criticisms the US face about white domination (and that is a fact), the FBI, according to Comey, wants people of colour to come on board. There is no paranoia that Blacks and Latino would hate the US Government and sabotage it. This is one of the reasons people from other countries gravitate to the US; they feel there are opportunities.
What Comey describes may come to an end under Trump whose race-based feelings are an open secret. But the diversity recruitment existed before Trump and if he ends it, it may very well be resuscitated under a president from the Democratic Party.
Will party leaders in Guyana ever feel secure once they were elected by one section of the Guyanese population only? That is an impossible question to answer. If green people put you in power, you will be inclined to favour them so they can maintain you in office. Could the answer be multi-racial parties?
I will end with some interesting observations from the opening pages of Comey’s book; “Who am I to tell others what ethical leadership is…although I am no expert, I have studied, read, and thought about ethical leadership since I was a college student and struggled for decades with how to practice it. No leader is available to offer those lessons so it falls to the rest of us who care about such things…”

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A page in Comey’s book saddened me as a Guyanese

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