This is how I see my role as a columnist in 2021

Apr 01, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – It is not that I am going to stop doing analysis on people, places and events as they occur. Of course not! People look for meaning behind the stories and they want the media and university academics to explain these happenings. So I will not stop writing on current issues.
However, there are literally untold hidden historical facts that unless we write about them, the present and forthcoming generations will never know what took place in their country long before they were born. History is the foundation, along with science of any society. Knowledge about your country’s history makes you understand how your fore parents lived and the circumstances under which you were able to survive.
Simply put, knowing your history is a priceless artifact. Here is a good example. Recently I mentioned in one of my columns that Georgetown’s water supply originated in what now stands as the Indian Monument Garden that is situated between Camp, Church and Thomas Streets and North Road.
Thousands of Guyanese pass that site each day and may not know the water their grandparents drank when living in Georgetown came from that place where the garden now sits. The garden is right opposite what used to be St. Roses High School. How many students knew right opposite their school was the location where Georgetowners got their drinking water?
What I plan to do on this page as much as possible is to write about things, yes things that need to be highlighted so the young people (70 percent of them are under 40 years) could know what Guyana was like and be informed about things that are equally shocking and pleasing.
It is important too that we reply to Guyanese who write fictions in the print media and on social media and pass them on as historical facts. A perfect example is Vincent Alexander. We have to reject what Alexander wrote about compulsory National Service because he offered downright fiction. It should not be allowed to go uncontested because young people may believe Alexander.
Here are the words of Alexander in a letter in this newspaper of November 1, 2020, “That Burnham made National Service compulsory is another of Freddie’s untruths. National Service was unapologetically compulsory for those benefitting from free university education.”
This is a shameless, disgraceful, depraved, cancerous distortion of contemporary Guyanese history and a fetid attempt to embellish the rotten dictatorship of President Burnham. Here are the facts of history that we need to relentlessly make public. No one was receiving free education at UG in 1976 when National Service (NS) was made compulsory. In 1976 UG was a fee-paying institution of which this columnist was a student paying for his tuition.
President Burnham scrapped fee-paying and instead introduced compulsory NS. You had no choice – do NS or leave. I refused to serve and was expelled from UG. Women rights activist, Vanda Radzik, refused to do NS and left UG. Burnham made NS compulsory for scholarship holders of all types in the public sector and trainee nurses.
This is just one egregious example of historical distortion that will fill the media as the fallout from the failed rigged election continues to haunt those who cannot re-enact the violent theatre of the era of the PNC’s domination of Guyana through permanent power.
I see my role as a columnist as confronting these distortions and publishing hidden depravities that need to be made public. Let me repeat what I published recently on this page and if I didn’t do that, the culprits who invented these unpalatable things will not be exposed.
The AFC and PNC signed the renewed Cummingsburg Accord in February 2020, literally two weeks before the March 2020 general election, and in the document there is a terrible clause. It stipulates that should the presidency become vacant, the incumbent Prime Minister (which would have been from the AFC, if APNU+AFC had won in 2020) would not succeed to the presidency but will agree for the position to be filled from within the PNC.
AFC and PNC chose not to make the document public because they knew they would have been ostracised by the Guyanese people. When PPP leader, Cheddi Jagan, as president died in 1997, he was succeeded by Sam Hinds, the leader of the other half of the coalition team, the Civic Component.
I plan as much as possible to write about these hidden, political sarcomas and to expose as much as possible the expanding fictions that people like Alexander and so many of his ilk attempt to foist on the young generation of Guyana. Expect much more in these columns in 2021.

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