Charles Ceres on entitlement: A response

Dec 16, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – There can be no deeper pathetic offering in any discussion of Guyanese politics than the application of the Black Lives Matter symbolism to Guyana. When you come from Greenland and you don’t know anything about Guyana and you read what people like Charles Ceres is talking about, then you think Guyana is a white country with a white power establishment.
Mr. Ceres wrote a belated condemnation of the PNC when it was in power. He used two frameworks – Black Lives Matter and African entitlement. Concerning the latter, here are his words, “… all lives cannot matter when the current level of disparity exists between African Guyanese who were enslaved to build Guyana and other Guyanese who are enabled by the state.”
This is outright contempt for the facts of Guyanese history. It is sociological obfuscations and it falls within the realm of Goebbelsian extremism. The African entitlement theory when academic analysis is applied to it becomes political bullyism. I will elongate on its untenable contents in another column. Let’s present a case for Indian Lives Matter to Ceres in the attempt to exorcise from Guyana’s sociology, the falsehood that only Black Lives Matter.
I don’t know Charles Ceres personally. So respondents should let Ceres know that Indian Lives Matter. I was ordered to stop leaving my bicycle in the National Park that I did for almost 10 years. It was no coincidence the edict coincided with my daily criticism of the betrayal of the post 2011 dreams of the Guyanese people by the APNU+AFC government. Mr. Ceres’ wife, Nidibi Schiwiers, headed the Department of the Environment which had jurisdiction over the National Park.
I took my letter personally to her office. Her secretary told me she was out of the country. Wanting an urgent intervention, I called Mr. Ceres by phone for her email address. He told me he will send it to my email. I didn’t get it. Long after Schiwiers came back, I attempted to make contact umpteen times. My bicycle eviction was never discussed. Subsequently, the National Park stopped me from entering the compound where the head office is located. Then I was stopped from feeding a stray cat.
I wonder if being an Indian had anything to do with it. Ceres mentioned the PNC’s compensation to people when it came to power but he left out my case. I wonder if it is because I am an Indian. Maybe Ceres could explain. But here is what happened.
Dr. Mark Kirton, consultant to the government, requested the Ombudsman report on my illegal termination at UG. He said he will make a case for compensation. He drove into the National Park where I was running with my dog to collect the documents. The matter died there and then. If Mr. Ceres was living in Guyana at the time when Dr. Kirton tried to help me, I wonder if he would have acted; after all, Mr. Ceres’ grandfather knew my father, my mother and my eldest sister very well. I wonder if Mr. Ceres didn’t act because I was Indian.
Academics and political observers need to focus on the words of Ceres in which he bemoaned the state enabling Guyanese groups than Africans. Make no mistake, this is the new ideology of an anti-PPP mindset that essentially argues that African Guyanese have been so badly treated that its time they confront the “Indianised” government.
Ceres’ narrative is straight out of the playbook of some people whose company I am sure Charlie would not like to be in. The obvious name that pops up is Rickford Burke. My Tuesday column had to confront the insane, asinine and dangerous sermon of a woman in another publication who argued that Guyana has an inherent bias against Black people.
If it wasn’t for the sensitive state of race relations at the moment courtesy of the Cotton Tree demagoguery of Joseph Harmon and David Granger last year, that woman’s thinking would be extremely comical. Any history book on Guyana will not fail to mention the cultural and religious discrimination Guyanese Indians have suffered for since they arrived.
I end with a question for Charlie. Is it true that the Burnhamite state had enabled your parents and you? If true, then at the same time I would have been starving in Wortmanville. Burnham also denied me the right to work in my own country. Was it because I was an Indian? What you think, Charlie?
(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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