Dear Editor,
I wish to extend my tremendous gratitude to Mr John Mair for his confidence in my potential as per his letter ‘Barista to President’ (SN, Aug 31). On the surface of it, despite my being labelled (along with other resident writers) as “lazy and incompetent” by Mr Mair’s good friend and former Editor of the Caribbean Press, the newly reclusive Dr David Dabydeen, I do seem to have been strangely accumulating titles and honours.
That said, I fear that Mr Mair’s confidence in my ability to move from serving coffee to serving as President of Guyana is greatly misplaced. For example, it has been over a year since I entered the public service as a lowly Cultural Policy Advisor and despite my best efforts I cannot seem to locate the over 30,000 copies of Caribbean Press books that Mr Mair, Dr Dabydeen and former Minister of Culture, Dr Frank Anthony assured us were distributed to schools. In case Mr Mair has forgotten, let me remind him of his exact words (‘Johnson should move on to more creative matters’ SN, June 14, 2013):
“The Caribbean Press was set up in 2008 after noted regional writers like Derek Walcott petitioned then President Jagdeo at Carifesta. Since then it has published 59 titles and 38 more are in preparation ‒ 30,000 copies of books in total. All, bar author copies and Austin’s bookshop copies (which I hope I helped to facilitate) have been given to schools and public libraries in Guyana.”
Indeed, the only official records of such books I can find indicate a total of 60 copies each of a mere ten titles handed over to the Ministry of Education in 2009 – that is, a combined total of just 600 copies.
I have had even less success finding a single copy of the 6 ten-minute “documentaries on Guyana/China” for which a Mr John Mair seems to have been paid $1,035,000 in November of 2013, according to the 2013 list of expenditure presented in the Sports and Arts Fund Audit report (page 73/93), under activity 4420101, payment voucher 4403853. The report is available for download on the Ministry of Finance website, but I am unable to find any evidence of any such documentaries either being launched in the media or attributed to Mr Mair on his Wikipedia page which lists such clever, illustrious fare as Playing Footsie with the FTSE (2009).
While I believe I can claim some humble successes in advancing the development of cultural policy in Guyana over the past year, I fear that my glaring incompetence in the above areas render me unfit for higher office – indeed, considering my chances of success of locating either books or documentaries, I foresee a very swift return to my humble barista duties in the near future.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
