My daughter’s generation was at stake

Dec 06, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – In Guyana, half of the population is 18 years and under, and 70 percent is between 30 and 40 years. This means a majority of the Guyanese people have no experience in living under a government where there is a strong-man ruler who dictates to the citizenry and the citizenry cannot remove him.
He does whatever he wants because there is no election where he can lose. Guyana’s people then do not know what destruction – physical and psychological – they just escaped from between March and July of this year.
It is nine months since Clairmont Mingo stood in front the cameras of the world and began to alter the results of the 2020 election.
Since then, I have encountered people and received dozens of emails that direct me to look at what the PPP/C is doing. David Hinds, I was told, in an online newspaper – the Buxton Voice – lambasted me for my silence since the PPP/C came into power on August 2. The implication is obvious – I wasn’t silent from March to July and now I am in December.
There is no scientific, psychological and political connection between speaking up from March to July and my so-called silence. What I did in my columns from March to July was to save my daughter and her generation.
It was Tuesday afternoon, March 3. The place was Kaieteur News Radio. Gerry Gouveia was being interviewed by me and Leonard Gildarie of this newspaper.
Based on what Gouveia was saying, my mind went elsewhere. It was not that I wasn’t listening, I was, but my thoughts were elsewhere. There was a type of eerie coldness in my soul as Gouveia spoke. I truly became afraid in that radio station. Where did my mind go? To my youthful days, when I gave all my energy to fighting Forbes Burnham. Burnham’s narcissism and totalitarian success was frame worked in rigged election.
So what did Gouveia say? He said there was no work going on at GECOM. The Region Four votes were not being tabulated. He went on to add that GECOM people were there just mingling around but not working. He felt that something was wrong. I felt that something was wrong too. I knew something was wrong. I knew in my heart we were going back to the Burnham era of rigged elections.
In a silent moment in that studio, I decided that my daughter will not go through what I did in the 70s and 80s. I decided my country will not go through what Walter Rodney gave his life for. I may not be able to stop it, but I knew in my heart, my energy had to be reborn.
I spent two weeks in that studio with Gildarie exposing rigged elections.
I wrote a daily column for five months exposing rigged elections. I am not a religious person so I wasn’t praying, but each day I hoped desperately my daughter and my country would not become victims of permanent power as my wife and I did.
The current population of this country does not have a clue, even a remote one, as to how different this country’s history would have been if we had free and fair elections. Two names come to mind – Cheddi Jagan and Walter Rodney. If the 1968 election was not as rigged by Burnham and Jagan had won, would he have had the cult following among Guyanese Indians in and out of this country?
Is it possible he would have settled down as a normal president and just ruled as any normal Head of State? It was the fight against the Burnham dictatorship that made Jagan, an international hero. The same for Rodney. If the PPP had won the 1973 election, Rodney may never have become an international hero too.
A PPP government would have allowed him to work at UG and Rodney may have spent the rest of his life writing books and may have accepted to become head of UG.
Hamilton Green in a published interview with me (KN, October 16, 2017) was unapologetic in denying Rodney an appointment at UG. His trenchant words are contained in that interview. Here were two men – Forbes Burnham and Hamilton Green – in 1974 rejecting a Guyanese scholar to work at UG when those two men had no legal right to be part of the government, a government that came into being through fraud.
The international community and heroic Guyanese on August 2, 2020 stopped the return of permanent power.
Those young people in Guyana, if they are going to be parents and live in Guyana, must ensure we never see the return of unelected rulers.

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

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