Dear Editor,
The Editorial for Friday 19th January in the Jamaica Gleaner reads “President Jagdeo’s shame” (http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/ gleaner/20070119/cleisure/cleisure1.html). The reasoning was sound, the articulation eloquent, the conclusion rational.
And yes, we owe it to ourselves as Christians, and to the idea of democracy as defined by a free and impartial press, to respond by subscribing lustily to Stabroek News until the government sees the error of its ways. It is active but non-violent, and should not draw a “security threat” response from the Minister of Home Affairs. But in the overall context of what is happening in Guyana today, it may also have missed the point. Would the editorial have considered “news” any current development other than Mr. Jagdeo’s woeful miscalculation on the withdrawal of ads from Stabroek News?
The editorial generally follows the trend of “careful” reporting in the generally Judeo-Christian Caribbean that taps the wrist of politicians in Guyana that have broken every rule in the democratic rule-book since 1992, in the process subjecting these politicians to a lesser standard of scrutiny and accountability that others in the Caribbean could not have hoped to escape. Is this acceptable in Jamaica?
I submit that it could have been labeled “President Jagdeo’s shame” for a number of other valid reasons, many of which can be summed up in his (Jagdeo’s) avoidance of the issues raised in the church’s opposition to the introduction of casino gambling in Guyana, the draft position to be found at www.caribevangelical.org/pdfs/guyanagambling.pdf, and the final position to be had by writing Guyana evangelical@Yahoo.com until it replaces the draft online. First, the Minister of Home Affairs, and so Mr. Jagdeo’s government, ignores the church’s plea that none of what the “casino-bill” advocates can be found in the National Development Strategy and the Poverty Reduction Strategy, both key parts of the incumbent government’s manifesto for the last election scarcely four months past. To the extent that no less than 30 casinos are eventually envisaged to pepper the Guyana landscape, this represents an unprecedented social experiment in the territory. The deliberate intention here was to ram this legislation down the throats of the people, simply because of a majority in Parliament. This is deception. How acceptable would this have been in Jamaica? Second, the Minister of Home Affairs, and so Mr. Jagdeo’s government, offered no research, no impact study, and ignored all the evidence of the fragile social infrastructure in Guyana, and completely ignored the provisions of Sections 13 and 50 of the Constitution that call for meaningful involvement of civil society and parliament in the decision-making processes of the state. How acceptable would this be in Jamaica?
Third, the Minister of Home Affairs and the Minister in the Ministry of Education, and so Mr. Jagdeo’s government, ignored the colossal evidence of the USA’s International Narcotics Strategy Control Report (INSCR) 2006, volumes I and II, summarized at pages 5 and 6 of the church’s draft position paper (www.caribevangelical.org/pdfs/guyanagambling.pdf) that the capacity, indeed the will, of the Jagdeo government was questionable on the drug and money-laundering issues that now confront Guyana. The implications of these reports are as astonishing as President Jagdeo’s comment on the “Spotlight” programme just before the last elections that relative to the parts of the reports that related to “land concessions to drug lords” the then American Ambassador had told him privately that the US State Department had “made a mistake” and that “it would be corrected next year”. Then we had the Roger Khan debacle
