Dear Editor,
In one of my Sunday Consumer Corner columns I made reference to 10 managers of The New Building Society having Indian surnames.
I was referring to the words of the Chairman of the NBS Board of Directors in a spotlight programme where he said there were three managers and two were Indian.
My intention was to show that the 2006 Annual Report of the Society mentioned 11 managers, 10 of whom had Indian names in contrast to the Chairman’s words. It could be that the Chairman was using the word “Managers” to refer to persons of higher rank than the 11 referred to in the Report. Exposing the inaccuracy would give members of the NBS a better insight into the quality of presentation of the Board.
Most people would know that in my long career in public life as a trade unionist, as an active member of the Public Service Co-operative Credit Union, as a sponsor of women’s cricket and as a consumer advocate, people’s ethnicity was never a concern to me. It is a great pity that it has become a fashion in today’s Guyana to distort anything that one says as “racist”.
I hope that the day will return to Guyana when we think of ourselves simply as people and not as races or classes and when some do not make it a pastime to call others “racist” when they have a grudge against them.
Yours faithfully,
Eileen Cox
