Eusi Kwayana: The disgraceful fall of an icon

Oct 21, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – This analysis here is addressed specifically to those, who, in the seventies in the struggle for free and fair elections and the removal of the Burnham dictatorship, loved, admired and respected Eusi Kwayana and still do. I ask of them the question; do you still believe in freedom, liberty, justice and humaneness that you once embraced in the seventies and if you do, then, do you still have the same soulful feelings for Kwayana since March 2020 that you once had?
From March 2020 from his attitude to the rigging of the national elections, I am convinced without even a modicum of hesitation and an ounce of doubt in my mind that in the fifties and sixties, Kwayana incited racial feelings and created physical and mental divisions between Africans and Indians. What is regrettable is that those who lived in that era are either in advanced age or have departed this world so they cannot contribute to a revisionist exposure of this man’s negative role in the evolution of an ethnically traumatized country.
Below are the words of Kwayana; not what other people think he said but his own words in his letter in this newspaper yesterday with a most appalling and devilish title, “If I had condemned persons on election rigging, I might have been called as a witness.” Any high school child would know that this emanation is pathetic nonsense that Kwayana should be ashamed of.
Let’s quote what Kwayana chose not to condemn and what he condemns; what he hasn’t got the facts on and he has the facts on, “A certain journalist (Frederick Kissoon began calling on me from about the 2nd week of March 2020 to condemn certain electoral officials suspected of committing electoral offences. This journalist did not understand why I will not allow myself the liberty of condemning persons on the basis of facts and allegations best known to persons dealing with them.”
Now here are the facts that Kwayana knows about of what has taken place in less than two weeks but this same man cannot see or grasp or understand facts that have been in existence for five months. Read now the devious mind of Kwayana. Vivid pictures come into your head of what this man did to Guyana in the fifties and sixties. He wrote, “Voices have been raised against the type of treatment handed down to the women seen by the authorities as suspects. Without any idea of their involvement, I see the treatment these women have received from the police as a version of that received by women recently brutalized and killed almost as some kind of pastime. I listened to a complaint or protest by the current Leader of the Opposition in Parliament who named two Ministers as “inserting themselves” into the Police investigation process in order to intimidate women suspects and put them under duress when they exercise their right not to make statements.”
Do I need to comment on this man’s glaring, graphic and barefaced hypocrisy? Isn’t that hypocritical mind obvious to any human that read this column here on his double standards? This man openly comments on events that occurred within the time frame of six weeks, a month, two weeks ago. He has the temerity to write that he listened on the radio to what the Opposition Leader said and reproduced the accusation of the Opposition Leader against two current cabinet ministers
Yet this very gentleman did not listen and read what formidable international figures had to say about the rigging of the 2020 elections. One radio station beaming to the world (Kaieteur Radio) brought out facts about the rigging for five months in daily broadcast and interviews with those very formidable international figures.
Let us list some of those global personalities; the then chairperson of CARICOM, Mia Mottley; the current chairman of CARICOM, Ralph Gonsalves; the current PM of Trinidad; two former CARICOM PMs – Bruce Golding and Owen Arthur; the chairman of the OAS; the head of the commonwealth Secretariat (a Black woman); the former president of Liberia and Nobel laureate – Ellen Sirleaf; members of the Black Caucus in the US House of Representatives; the head of the United Nations; the UWI Vice –Chancellor, a Black historian who writes on Black history and dozens more.
In the beginning of this column, I noted that I am addressing specifically those who fought with Kwayana in the seventies. I ask them if they accept this man’s position on the March 2020 election rigging and if they do not see a damning contradiction between his present stance and what he stood for in the seventies. My conclusion is that Kwayana deceived an entire generation of Guyanese.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)