Opposition complaints about the media

Apr 11, 2021 Editorial

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Kaieteur News – We at this publication are embarrassed yet again for the leaders of the opposition, this time in the wake of the sorry outreach and appeal to the United States Ambassador to Guyana, Ms. Sarah-Ann Lynch, to record their despair over how the Guyanese media has supposedly treated the political group and its leaders in carrying its messages.

We place this front and center before the coalition’s top people: what messages? We have made sure, on most, if not every occasion, that we carry news articles about developments relative to the group’s elections petitions to Guyana’s highest courts (even though we have our own positions on the constitutional validity of those petitions). We have not allowed a single instance of the termination of any high-profile public servant, possibly a supporter of the former coalition government, to pass us by, or the attention of the readership of this paper. We have covered those stories, and we have carried editorials that included in some shape or form commentary on such unacceptable and unhelpful situations. Our commentaries have been pungent and unsparing of the current PPP/C government, with respect to such firings, no matter how subtly and skillfully they have been executed. We offer the example of that stalwart Guyanese oil expert, Dr. Vincent Adams – himself a coalition executive – and his forced and unseemly departure from Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency, and as so clumsily orchestrated by top PPP leaders.

For the coalition leaders to go before the U.S. Ambassador and present this picture of inaccuracy is mystifying, and insulting. We will not be so presumptuous and seize for ourselves the right to speak on behalf of the rest of the media, but we take serious offence at how the coalition leadership has portrayed sections of the local media to the Ambassador.

This is counter to what we have been about, and we are on record as opening our doors in one attempt after another, and for months now, to engage and encourage spokespeople from inside the coalition hierarchy (as selected by the party) to come into our studios, to come before our audience and share their side of the story, and to be receptive also to probing and honest questions. There have not been any takers from the coalition side, save for an occasional engagement. We are here to do our part, and the coalition must also do its part, by putting their best foot forward; it must stop looking back.

The coalition must come quickly to the realisation that the devastating and despairing elections interval, of a best forgotten last year, is over and now history. There is governance of a country that is involved. And just in case that the main coalition leaders may have forgotten, it is this country, this Guyana of ours, of which we are talking, that is at stake. This country is not being governed cleanly, but craftily and secretly. This is where the coalition would be worth more than its weight in gold. But it has to pull its weight, and from all indications, the coalition is struggling. Its leadership has to remember that it is an essential part of Guyana’s existing mechanism for the exercise of democratic governance.
Specifically, it has to be a muscular and undeniable presence with what is going on with the nation’s oil wealth. That wealth is not being handled rightly by any reasonable standard, and yet the opposition is content to be largely disconnected, mostly shadowy.
The coalition ought to be pressing without letup, but now it blames, rather lamely, the press for its own failings, its own weaknesses, its own disappointing record that leaves us wondering if it can honestly be called an opposition. That is, a principled one, a formidable one, and one that makes a runaway and roguish government pause in its tracks and rethink.
We would like to see the coalition take a tough stand on some key issues because the nation’s present welfare and prospects in the years and generations ahead are involved and at great risk. Those prospects, waited on so long by our forefathers, are here now; and the manner in which they have been handled by the new government leaves so much to be desired, so much that is condemnable. It cannot be that the best the coalition can come up with is that the local media is blocking its messages and, therefore, it has to resort to reaching out to the American Ambassador for help in getting those messages out there before the widest possible audience. Once again, the coalition has found a way to dodge its important responsibilities, by handing over the ball to others for them to carry.

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