The Michael Carrington incident: Unbearable hypocrisy

Dec 13, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – People should not deny the right of a group to defend their members and colleagues. What critics, analysts and human rights activists should do is to examine within the context of the country’s life, the raison d’être of these groups.

The raison d’être of any NGO or civil society group is not one-dimensional. If that group chooses to concentrate and emphasise only one particular trait of its existence then it is utterly hypocritical and should be constantly exposed.

Let’s provide examples, no other entity in a country needs to expend energy on human rights and anti-discriminatory practices than a homosexual organisation. LGBT people face scorn, humiliation and discrimination the world over.

In the face of this reality, there is a huge compulsion of LGBT groups to defend the rights of all people who society mistreats. In Guyana, the LGBT organization is known as SASOD. It is my right to extend respect or withdraw respect.

No government or organization or individual can tell you who to admire and who to respect. I have absolutely zero tolerance and respect for SASOD because I know it has no intention of rallying to the causes of other people who society has failed.

There is the Bar Association. Its raison d’être is the preservation of rule of the law and everything associated with the wholesomeness of laws, the constitution, the dispensation justice and the practice of law in general.

So the Bar Association and its members went and picket the Eve Leary police station over the police detaining a lawyer for 10 seconds. That lawyer turned out to be a privileged person because ten seconds is a cup of ice cream compared to what the police do other people that this columnist knows about from his activism of over 5 decades.

The Bar Association has not uttered one word, muchless ten, on horribly light sentences in the court that cannot be justified under any circumstances even the most generous sentencing guidelines. There is so much wrong in this country about the dispensation of justice but the Bar Association finds time to trample upon the neatly manicured lawns of the Eve Leary police station.

Enter Michael Carrington. Mr. Carrington was a former Member of Parliament. He went to uplift two hundred American dollars from Western Union and was refused because as he wrote about his plight in the newspapers last Sunday, he was told that under the anti money-laundering legislation, he is a “Politically Exposed Person.”

That is a depraved violation of a citizen’s constitutional right. I have argued countless times on this page that financial houses do not understand the law and are either abusing it out of ignorance or deliberately hassling small people.

Context is everything in life. I have written on this page that the commercial banks cannot apply the Act to someone whose saving account has had no input for several years and only small withdrawals.

In the case of Carrington, he is not a frequent receiver of money from Western Union and on this occasion the sum is two hundred American dollars. Again, I stress; context is everything in life and in this context, Carrington’s transaction is utterly harmless.

Carrington wrote his letter on Sunday, the next day, I saw no expression of support for him by the Bar Association, the Guyana Human Rights Association, Article 13, the trade unions among other organization.

As a Guyanese reading this column in whatever country you are in, I ask you; do you think this is the end of the Michael Carrington incident or there will be an outpouring of criticism of what Western Union did to him?

If you think that tomorrow, hypocrisy will disappear from this land, then, you are not living in the real word. You see the Ralph Ramkarran theory of sex appeal is relevant here. Umpteen times, I have explained what this theory is about.

Mr. Ramkarran argued that civil society bodies choose carefully which issue to highlight rather than looking at the broad spectrum of issues to be ventilated. He postulates that speaking out on some situations brings sex appeal and that is what these men and women are after. By sex appeal he means maximum publicity.

It is a plausible theory. The picketing at Eve Leary proved that the Ramkarran theory has efficacy. The lawyers’ picket exercise was all over the media. It was given maximum publicity. The event carried sex appeal.

Anyone reading this column and familiar with the decline of Guyana’s collective character believes that there is going to come to the rescue of Carrington and condemn Western Union? If you do, then you have not lived in Guyana and don’t know a damn thing about it; not even one thing.

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

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