Ruel Johnson confronts the racism of the PPP’s leadership

NOVEMBER 23, 2015 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER LETTERS

Dear Editor, I refer to the letter signed by a Stacy Cheong, “Public officer’s Facebook page has racist undertones” (Kaiteur News, 21-Nov-205). The name is a fictitious one and while I am not inclined to dignify the actual author with a response, I believe I am obligated to speak to the wider context. (I should note here that my response does not reflect the views of the Ministry of Education and simply constitute my personal rebuttal of an agenda that has entered the legitimate public domain.) An original letter by Ms. Cheong was published in the Guyana Times after I was one of several people to condemn a divisive Facebook posting by PPP MP Nigel Dharamlall and the racist and violence-inciting comments that he allowed under that posting. I also condemned the PPP’s demand that GECOM provide the ethnicity of its 2015 elections workers, and a thinly veiled ethnocentric Diwali speech made by opposition leader Bharrat Jagdeo in New York. Subsequent to those postings, the same charges of “vindictive, biased and racist agenda” were leveled privately to one person I report to, and came from a PPP executive member who operated in a senior capacity to Mr. Kwame McCoy and who would have been aware of the stable of clandestine bloggers paid for by the state. A modified version of that charge (minus the accusation of racism) was made by PPP Chief Whip, Gail Teixeira and former AG Anil Nandlall in an article on a fake news website, one of several established by the PPP since their electoral loss. (It is on that same website in a different article that a charge of racism has been leveled against President David Granger.) Outside of that site, neither former multi-portfolio Minister and Presidential Advisor on “governance” Teixeira who has a record of leveling absurd allegations (like her comparing the local independent media to the instigators of the Rwandan genocide), nor Nandlall whose thinly veiled threats to Kaieteur journalists scandalized the post of Attorney-General have opted to express those comments in any media of record. I am not a politician – when it comes to my personal pronouncements on issues that affect this society, I am a citizen first, a writer with a voice second, and anything else after. I therefore refuse to be complicit in any delusion that the PPP is not in fact carrying out a deliberate campaign of ethnic division and social sabotage. With my regard to my public assignments, my task as a government advisor on cultural policy is to ensure that there are systems in place to provide respect for cultural and national heritage; innovation in creative industries; and equity when it comes to the exercise of citizenship in Guyana. These are all previously deliberately neglected measures critical to both national development and integration into the global development agenda. The challenges are many. We have no policy on heritage or creative industries, and systems purportedly established to support the creative arts have been mired in corruption and otherwise poor accountability. When it comes to Culture Ministers, particularly Teixeira and Dr. Frank Anthony, we’ve had rank incompetence, posturing, and failure to produce on as basic an issue as modernized intellectual property legislation. We’ve had the deliberate degradation of artistic institutions that were established as early as the 1970s and a superficial rehashing of those programmes presented as new forty years later. Today, a consultative process of policy creation has started at which everyone will be invited to contribute – this is in keeping with the APNU-AFC manifesto commitment to “consult with experts in forming a consensus-driven policy formulation and execution mechanism, inclusive of clear and unbiased channels for monitoring and evaluation.” With regard to my role on the Carifesta Committee, my goal was to ensure that Guyana’s culture was adequately represented and that there was fairness and accountability in the selection system. The committee was comprised of several people including a candidate on the PPP’s 2015 slate. For the first time in my experience of Carifesta there was a public call for participation, open audition sessions, and audition scores that are now part of the Ministry record’s record. I am also a director on the Board of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited. My primary duty there is to ensure that citizens are not subject to attack because of their political affiliation, ethnicity or their legitimate right to criticize government. The board has extended an invitation to at least one senior PPP parliamentarian to write a column with no restrictions on content. The days of blatantly racist state paper editorials and attacks on citizens with no right of reply afforded to them are over. My advice to Freedom House, Teixeira and Nandlall in particular, is that the methodology of clandestine attack, whether phone calls to employers or fake letter writers or fake news website interviews, was not a completely effective method in fending off [my] criticism while you were in power and it will be even less effective now. If you believe what you have to say has any integrity whatsoever, you can openly represent it in the public domain. Ruel Johnson