Dear Editor,
I am responding to an open letter to me from Mr Mike Persaud (SN, September 22) on the Bisram poll controversy. Mr Persaud did add a section onto the main correspondence in which he looked at the pessimistic future of Guyana. I will add a note on that too. I am not going to get into the credibility dimension of the Bisram issue. I honestly feel Mr Bisram has embarrassed himself by the inflexible resistance to engage in transparency.
I will not confront Mr Persaud on his points; suffice it to say I cannot locate any UG lecturer that was willing to say they knew Bisram. That does not mean he didn’t have UG students working for him in 1997. I need to remind Mr Persaud that Bisram wrote a letter, the relevant section which I have reproduced several times, in which he admitted that he could not identify his field workers because they would be in trouble here in Guyana because instead of being at their desks, they were working for him. He never stated that on one project, he had the service of UG students
Finally, Mr Persaud needs to know that Mr Bisram has written several items of correspondence to the newspapers announcing the twenty-year-old existence of Nacta activities as a polling organization and that he is employed as the polling director for Nacta and that he has that amount of years as a pollster. In one missive, he listed a person as the head of Nacta. Then that particular person wrote a letter on behalf of Bisram and signed his name as the Communications Officer of Nacta. I am not going to go further with this because he feels that Bisram is Nacta and Nacta is Bisram. With that disclosure, will Bisram still tell people he conducts surveys for Nacta?
Now, my essential argument. I rejected Bisram as a genuine, scientific pollster because of something I discovered that smelled fishy. In one of his polls of 535 persons sampled, three years ago, he came up with the name Fenton Ramsahoye as being one of the popular names among those questioned to run as a presidential candidate. I thought that was impossible. It couldn’t be true. This is the country where I live and I study it as a political analyst. Over seventy per cent of our population is below the age of 35. Fenton Ramhasoye disappeared from the radar of Guyana since the sixties. And never made news about himself since then. It was clear to me then and now that this was a fake discovery. I will ask readers not to think that I am chauvinist but no one can change my mind about my rejection of that finding of Bisram; I am unmoved about my stance on this position. That was the end of my acceptance of Vishu Bisram as a scientific pollster
Since then I have found many amazing findings of Mr Bisram that mean he is not doing scientific projects in the field. Three consecutive polls have found that Mr Jagdeo is loved but his ministers and his party are not that admired. I will stick to my doubts about this especially when one of those polls was done at a time when the media were saying positive words about a young, female cabinet minister that was making a name for herself. One of the fault lines in Mr Bisram’s so-called polls is the structuring of the questions. I confronted Mr Bisram on this, years ago. Finally, Mr Bisram wrote that he has done many surveys in various countries. As a teacher that is a lot of money to spend. Mr Andrew Hicks, Head of the Department of Sociology at UG told me that if a scientific poll was to be done in Guyana to test the Guyanese attitude to politics and their politicians using a representative sample it will cost around a million dollars. He said his calculations are based on expenses involved in paying field workers, travels around Guyana and related expenses like accommodation, etc. I agree this would be less if Bisram moved around with volunteers all the time
Leaving the Bisram controversy now, I thank Mr Persaud for the end section of his letter in which he reflected on the bleak future of this country given our ethnic divisions. It is really refreshing and hopeful to hear Indian people come out and speak out against the use of racial discrimination in the exercise of power in this country. I hope we see more letters from Mr Persaud on this theme.
Yours faithfully,
Frederick Kissoon
Editor’s note
We do not accept open letters; Mr Mike Persaud’s letter should have been a normal letter to the editor and the ‘open letter’ heading should have been deleted.
The correspondence on the issue of Mr Bisram’s polls is now closed.
