Dear Editor,
It took me an entire two weeks, to make up my mind as to what to make of that guest editorial of Saturday, February 3, under the title. “The PNC at 50”. To tell you the truth, I still cannot come to terms with the supposed objective – what benefits for the readership, especially those of tender age, for example?
To me, that article confirms one thing, that Stabroek News would go to any lengths to do the PNCR the most possible harm in the eyes of the populace. Look, for example, at the lengths to which this newspaper went, last year, and indeed, has been going for some time previously, to incite and manipulate the establishment of a grouping whose main and possibly sole purpose was to make inroads into the traditional support base of the PNCR. Do not tell me that those fictitious “polls” to which your medium gave such emphasis, did not have such an aim; that the Dick Morris fantastic predictions and that man’s supposed “free” services in the instance, were not really meant to make doubly sure that the PNCR did not pose a real threat to your (erstwhile?) pet party, the PPP/C.
The nation knows that you are understandably disappointed with that last-named grouping but equally, most readers seem to suspect that you would rather lose an arm, a leg – whatever, than admit that, whatever the PNC’s past errors of omission or commission, those cannot come near to bringing the kind of harm or infamy included by the current regime.
Fancy, a “guest editorial” on a 50th anniversary of the PNC and nothing said about improvements introduced or even attempted for and in Guyana, in all those decades! Could you imagine in all your sanest moments, a 50-year review of that grouping, and no mention about the relief it brought to Lindeners, by constructing the highway that put the infamous R H Carr into becoming only a bad memory? Couldn’t that editorial even hint, to youngsters born after the road-building decade of the late sixties-early seventies, something about the red dust that was previously such a prevailing nuisance to commuters, prior to that time, all the way from Charity to Skeldon?
You mean, not a mention about the Demerara Harbour Bridge, the Canje Bridge, or the National Insurance Scheme, whose funds will now finance the promised bridge at the mouth of the mighty Berbice?
Let us hope the last-named is not blown away in the first Atlantic storm that veers a little closer in all these predicted changes we are now warned to expect.
Could that writer not have said something about the party’s involvement (and especially that of the much-reviled LFS Burnham) in the restoration of initiatives for Caribbean unity? Look how, every time a Carifesta year comes around, others in the Caribbean recall that first Carifesta, when Guyana found such ingenious ways to house those participants. Surely, a hint could have been included in that article that there was an idea from which the present incompetent bombasts might have taken a small leaf, for Cricket World Cup accommodation. Look how they could have solved so many needs and got rid of the present culture of shanty towns all over Guyana.
So when the Stabroek links its loss of government advertisements with times and things of the PNC government, one is left to wonder whether all this is just another ruse for maligning, reviling and demonising the PNCR. After all, in those 50 years, nothing happened under a PNC government, to even come near the trauma Guyana has endured over the past 15-scams galore, drug-running in all shapes and forms, murders galore, cabinet outreaches that spend money which could have been used to keep our schools day, and all because so many have fostered the current lot.
I urge the Stabroek News to take stock and hopefully change their course – after coming to terms with what the alternative to such change could mean – to us all.
Yours faithfully,
Walter A Jordan
