Sherwood Lowe puts me in the category and legacy of Walter Rodney

May 30, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – I hardly reply to people like Sherwood Lowe whose political perspectives I have nothing but contempt for. Lowe is a PNC ideologue with large overtones of ethnically driven sociological views.
I read his support for the APNU+AFC’s refusal to constitutionally honour the no-confidence vote (NCV) in a letter in the newspapers. I replied with a column of Friday August 30, 2019, captioned, “We have an obligation to Guyanese to provide the other side.” I wrote about Lowe’s politics back then in that piece saying that it was, “A dangerous, nauseating and propagandistic interpretation by a university lecturer on the NCM.”
Lowe had the temerity to state in that letter that the Guyanese people saw the NCV as a betrayal. He didn’t express the same feeling when the PNC engineered a no-confidence motion in 2010 to topple the Ramotar presidency. Please consult the column for more of my disgust on Lowe’s politics.
I remember he wrote a letter to the Stabroek News during the 2020 election campaign requesting the newspaper to drop Ralph Ramkarran as a columnist because he is a politician contesting the election.
He deliberately chose to ignore that Moses Nagamootoo was doing a column at the same time in the Guyana Chronicle. I decided not to reply after Stabroek News penned an editorial note stating the paper had no intention of removing Ramkarran’s column.
Yesterday I was in the National Park with my dog and this gentleman that I knew from UG years ago, came out of his car and told me if I saw a few people praising Lowe in the newspapers. I told him I didn’t but the world has and will always have fools who are enemies of freedom and I refuse to be bothered with those people.
Then this gentleman informed me of something that I never knew. I opened my mouth in disbelief. I did not know Lowe wrote a disparaging letter on me during the March 2020 election campaign. That was a busy time for me and like all humans, you miss a few things you shouldn’t.
I went and researched Lowe’s letter based on the timeline I was given by the gentleman. It is titled, “Personal bitterness has driven these comments,” SN, February 25, 2020. Lowe contends that the criticisms by me and Christopher Ram against the APNU+AFC administration was because we were bitter we didn’t get particular things we wanted from the APNU+AFC regime.
Here is what Lowe wrote about me, “For Kissoon, that instant came when he suspected that the government most likely believed that placing him anywhere near his beloved UG would be an act of destruction.” If the government of the PNC, WPA and the AFC felt that way, they are the most idiotic politicians in the world with tiny brains, infinitesimal minds and zero morality.
Political parties win elections out of the electorate’s expectation that they will right egregious wrongs done to individuals and organisations by previous regimes. Two of Guyana’s most brilliant lawyers researched my dismissal from UG for the Ombudsman and ruled it was illegal. The new government had a deep, moral obligation to either compensate me or have my contract termination deemed illegal so I could have resumed my professional career.
It would be morbid dishonesty for me to say that after 2015 I didn’t want to go back to UG. I loved teaching philosophy. I think young students’ lives will forever be changed if they study the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Aristotle, Michel Foucault, etc. Between 2015 and 2020, I never asked any government minister to get me back at UG. I never raised the issue, never did.
Lowe was an unpublicised consultant to the PNC during the election campaign, so he knew what he was talking about when he said my presence at UG after 2015 would have been viewed by APNU+AFC as destructive. Here is what Hamilton Green said to me about Walter Rodney at UG, “Why would you want someone like Rodney in of all places at the university.” See my column of Monday October 16, 2017, “Explosive Interview with Hamilton Green.”
I taught for 26 years at UG. My tenure included 20 years of PPP government and in that time, the PNC and AFC never thought of me as a destructive force on campus. When I was removed, the PNC and AFC picketed for me during two weeks of demonstration on campus. Mr. Granger met with the leaders of Operation Rescue UG that staged the protest. I was present. Granger phoned me to express his solidarity. I didn’t know he thought so negatively about my presence at UG. Thanks Mr. Lowe for informing me.
(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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