The returnees from the diaspora

May 16, 2018 Letters

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Dear Editor,
This is response to the missive of GHK Lall in SN of May 11; “Genuine diaspora returnees bring an immeasurable, invaluable quality back to the table of Guyana. His letter is in response to my April 29 column, “Many stayed and endured; that is sacrifice.”
GHK Lall is the return of a Stabroek News columnist, Shaun Samaroo. Samaroo saw many faults in Guyana but couldn’t see that who he was, constituted part of the problem he carped on. Samaroo was eventually unmasked and Stabroek News had to part company with him. It is the identical situation with GHK Lall.
Lall hates the style and language of critics in Guyana. He thinks people are irrational, scurrilous, self-serving etc. Lall is the personification of all that he finds unpalatable in Guyana. His incessant letters are verbose abuse of people and institutions he doesn’t like. His style is a sophisticated form of cuss down with gutter-like dimensions.
When you reply to him, by some weird, psychic contortion, he cries out; “What kind of country is this?” His so-called purity is exposed with every letter he pens. It is only a matter of time before he is exposed like Shaun Samaroo.
Here is just a sample of Mr. Purist when he writes about others; “Now I regret that I have to venture into the gutter that has become part of the local lifeblood and so dominant in the national mainstream. I feel stained and tainted and utterly disgusted. Is this what this country has become?
“Is this the emblematizing of national pastimes dedicated to malice, putridity, vulgarity, the dishonourable, the sickening, and so much more under the guise of journalism and public commentary?
“Again, what kind of country is this? What kind of society is it that spawns this degree of ugliness, lunacy, and embedded leprosy?” And when that is coupled to a troubled paranoiac state that can be dangerous. I seek distance as the sane does from rabid curs.”
GHK Lall personifies so much that is morbid about this country. I repeat his words; “I regret that I have to venture into the gutter.” I can produce letters of Lall since five, six, seven years ago and they will reveal he was always in the gutter.
Here is a sample from the May 11 letter; “…There are those few members of the diaspora who toil ceaselessly and quietly to make a difference through getting things done. This is enraging to the narrow-minded primitives…”
In that same missive, he refers to parliament as a cesspool. Note the language.
Having described the mindset of the GHK Lalls on this world, here now is my rebuttal to his eulogy of the diaspora returnees. His adumbration is obvious. Since he is a diaspora member who returned after more that forty years abroad, it serves his purpose to write unlimited panegyrics of his ilk. In a Freudian way, it hides his deceptions.
Lall’s letter is a poor argument in defence of the diaspora members who came home when Jagdeo was in power and now the PNC. His argument is asinine and arid because there are no methodological fulcrums on which they should rest. There are several categories diaspora returnees.
I will discuss only two – remigrants who came home to invest and middle age employees who no longer are recipients of the good life when they were younger in their adopted country.
The business remigrant comes in different age groups. They start as young as forty-five. They want no gifts from Government and the private sector. They want an enabling environment to secure their investment. These are admirable diaspora folks. I meet them all the time. They have opened up business all over Guyana. They go about, quietly, doing their thing.
The second type of diaspora returnees are the opportunistic category. They have nothing to offer Guyana but they want Guyana to offer them things and they do get them. Just one example should suffice because it is typical of this genre. Dr. Ivelaw Griffith in his sixties, on returning to Guyana to take up the appointment of UG Vice-Chancellor was interviewed by this newspaper. In that discussion he waxed lyrical about his thirty-six years experience living abroad. On reading this interview, you asked yourself; what was he doing thirty-six years outside of Guyana?
I will end by asking readers to do some checking on the age of the remigrants in this second category of diaspora folks. Two factors are graphic. They were all employees of state and private businesses in Canada, the UK, USA, etc. Secondly, their venture back into Guyana is done at an age where they are about to retire or have retired. In almost ninety percent of these cases, the age group is from 58 to 75.
Sincerely,
Frederick Kissoon

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