Dictatorial minds that discovered democracy since May 2015

AUGUST 4, 2015 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER FEATURES / COLUMNISTS, FREDDIE KISSOON

The Trinidadians call it pappy show. Americans call it bulls**t. Mainstream language refers to it as a masquerade. The more emotionally writer will dub it as sick minds. I would like to think I fall into the last category, because I (and by extension, my family) were victims of the sick minds I shut my mouth when Dominic Gaskin of the AFC became the Minister of Business in charge of GO-Invest, because if I had opened it to talk about Keith Burrowes, then people could have interpreted it to mean that as a known AFC supporter, I was trying to influence Gaskin’s attitude to Keith Burrowes. Mr. Gaskin could tell anyone with a straight face that since he became a Minister I have not had a word with him about anything at all. I have seen Mr. Gaskin only once since he became a Minister and that was for less than a minute when I saw him walking into the AFC offices one evening I chose to mention Mr. Burrowes now because he has resigned from GO-Invest. Mr. Burrowes was my student at UG. I always thought of him as a decent man. Mr. Burrowes was Chairman of GO-Invest when my wife became a victim of Messrs Jagdeo and Ramotar. I will leave it to Mr. Burrowes to tell readers, if he chooses to reply to this column, what happened with my wife at GO-Invest after her boss, Geoff Da Silva, left GO-Invest to become Guyana’s Ambassador to Venezuela. I hope Mr. Burrowes has the courage to face up to my factual statement that when he was Chairman of GO-Invest in 2011, he requested the GO-Invest staff to meet with PPP’s presidential candidate, Donald Ramotar, only, and not the other candidates from APNU and AFC. Maybe there was an explanation and Burrowes should offer it. Let me add a footnote; when Burrowes did that, my wife was already out Our old parents had the right saying for people like Keith Burrowes – “you make your bed, you must lie on it.” Let me repeat what I wrote before in one of these columns; that saying was the exact words I uttered to Raymond Azeez when he called me on the phone about rumours of certain NCN big-wigs that will have to resign. I told Azeez he was an election candidate and an election candidate cannot be a public servant. It boggles the mind to know that Burrowes, Mark Ramotar of Chronicle, Molly Hassan of NCN, Hydar Ally of the Public Service Ministry, and others of their ilk could actually stay and work with the APNU-AFC Government, when these people pledged loyalty not to the Government of Guyana, not to the territory of Guyana, but to the persona of Bharrat Jagdeo and the biology of the PPP. There is a certain UG academic that solicited money directly from the Office of the President during the tenure of Ramotar to fund a retreat for the Faculty of Social Sciences. Then Registrar, Vincent Alexander told me that was in the minutes of the Faculty meetings. It undermined the autonomy of UG. This same woman announced that President Ramotar should be honoured by UG on the 50th anniversary. The Ramotar presidency is over, but I am certain this lady is going to turn up soon in the bosom of the new administration. One wonders why Dharamkumar Seeraj is crying about RPA being overlooked for board appointments. When did Seeraj discover that democracy is about fair-play? Seeraj sat on the Council of the University of Guyana where seven of the Council Members had PPP membership and four were PPP Members of Parliament. Seeraj represented the community of farmers on the Council. Ask any other farmers’ association if they were consulted on the lawyer to represent them on UG’s Council. Ask the Bar Association if it was ever asked to name the UG Council member that spoke on behalf of lawyers. On the UG Council, there was a place for a representative of women. The most vibrant women group, Red Thread, was never asked even for an opinion. This was the way the PPP administered democracy in Guyana. It wasn’t democracy. It was dictatorship. This country has to endure the comical spectacle of a weekly press conference of the PPP in which a virtual mountain of accusations are being made against a new regime that is merely three months old. But that is not the horrific part of the spectacle. The accusations focus on grave depravities that the Guyanese people have come to associate with the twenty-three-year-old reign of the PPP. Two words describe it – pathological barefacedness.