Dear Editor,
I am partisan but in the matter of national reconciliation I aspire to place country above party. The Country, not the Party, is political Mother.
Early this month, May 2013, the relevant agency of the South African government announced with a brief, accompanying citation a decision to confer the Oliver Tambo Award on a former President of Guyana, Mr Burnham.
It has transpired that the process of arriving at the decision, quite correctly, included consultations, including consultation with the friends and members of the family of the states-man placed at the top of the honours list.
Without entering, as I shall do shortly, into the debate about the fitness of the award, I wish to protest the failure of the South African Govern-ment to consult or even give previous notice to, the family of the late Dr Walter Rodney, who under that President’s watch died at an early age in circumstances that were never formally investigated. Even in exercising its sovereign rights and powers, the land of Ubuntu did not apply the high wisdom of that culture to an area of unresolved issues of high sensitivity. I confine my remarks to the family of Dr Walter Rodney as his family is within easy reach of South Africa’s Ambassador to Washington, DC.
I can understand how the philosophy of the Govern-ment of South Africa allowed them to reach out tod with the Other whose loss was unnatural and uninvestigated by successive governments to this day. The opinions in this letter are my own and I speak for no one but myself
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana
