Dear Editor,
I saw Mrs Jagan twice on television after the death of her husband, saying that it used to pain her to see the nasty things people say of Dr Jagan. I have been married for 30 years now with an 18-year-old daughter, and I have carefully advised them over the long years that people will say nasty things about me and they must never ever let it bother them in the least because bad people, flawed people, unfair people, powerful people, selfish people, unjust people, exploitative people will resort to saying and writing nasty things about independent minds.
In the middle of the eighties, when Mr Hoyte was in power, a well-known supporter of the government of the day gave a GBC Viewpoint, and informed his listeners that I was declared persona non-grata in the Caribbean and that I was barred entry into Dominica and Bahamas. It was a complete falsehood but I didn’t sue. Such scandalous stories about me have gone on since then, right up to the present time. I can name Clem David, Roger Moore, Tony Vieira as persons I have seen on television casting aspersions on my character. I didn’t sue them. Now there is Walter Persaud who has added his own brand of nasty attack on my character.
Walter Persaud didn’t say in his letter that I have stopped him from spilling his propaganda about lovely and good government in Guyana. But that is what I did.
Persaud and his brother, Randy went on a letter rampage a few years back in support of the PPP Government in both independent dailes while refusing to come back to Guyana to serve the very government that they so embrace and the country that they feel the PPP has done so much to improve since the PNC lost power. But each time they wrote, many of us didn’t allow them to get away with their unbridled propaganda. I exposed their false theories about the PPP under Guyana. Others like David Hinds took them to task.
Walter and Randy Persaud, Rickey Singh, David Dabydeen and others like them would have been filling the heads of our young people about the good government we have in Georgetown if there weren’t academics in this country to take them on. I see my task as stopping these people from misleading Guyanese citizens. People like Walter Persaud know they will be exposed as mere propagandists when they write on Guyanese political sociology. He tells me that I should look in the Mirror. I did. And I saw someone who has never run away from his country during the 28 years of Burnham rule. I looked in the Mirror and I see someone that wants his country to have the modern comforts, a developed economy, a successful education system, a satisfactory medical system, and the sacred, priceless principles of democracy that Walter Persaud, his brother Randy, David Dabydeen and Rickey Singh and others like them enjoy where they live.
They can stay in the comfort of their modern niche and tell us how democratic the Guyana government is and the progress that Guyana is achieving under the PPP. But they are not coming back. They will not live here anymore. They will not send their children to a university that doesn’t have labs and books. They will not accept having constant blackouts for hours that make your professional life a nightmare. They would not live in a country where the drains in the capital city are clogged for decades, and where important roads have huge craters in them for years making the upkeep of a vehicle a too costly exercise. I don’t need to go on about the run down state in Guyana. The world knows about our poverty.
There is a mind-set in the Guyanese Diaspora. This section of the Guyanese Diaspora escaped from Guyana at a time when the PNC was a cruel government. They claimed that the Burnham government was racist and discriminatory. These very people today are over-zealous in support of a government that has nothing to show for sixteen years of power. But the embrace comes nevertheless because they see the community they belong to as the group that now has power in Guyana.
They tell us that they are educated. They tell us that they write books and teach at universities. But with all their education, they refuse to see the newer forms of cruel government in Georgetown, the same cruel government they fled from only it was run by the PNC. And this is because the only thing they can see in front of them is that their kind is on top in the control of power in Georgetown today. Funny how they saw bad government when a different group ruled Guyana in the seventies and eighties. Now their type is in control, and they are silent about identical forms of bad government. Mr Benschop was put in prison for five years. Mr Waddell was assassinated. Mr Hinckson is now in remand. If Burnham had done all of that, they would have roamed the earth denouncing him. I live in this country and I have a moral obligation to it because I love it. And I because I love it, I will do my best to expose those who sit in the comfort of European and North American modernity and support authoritarian rule in Guyana. I fought that authoritarian rule under Burnham, and I intend to fight it under Mr Jagdeo.
Yours faithfully,
Frederick Kissoon
