Dear Editor,
Mr Vishnu Bisram, in his letter captioned “Pollsters all over the world express political opinions,” (07.03.15) does not answer the question on whether or not there is some body of professional ethics debarring them from taking sides. Instead, this gentleman seems to be really stung at what I have referred to as a biased stance.
Mr Burnham has been dead these twenty years, and has many persons saying that he has done or left undone so many things, and here is Mr Bisram, a pollster mind you, taking up the subject.
Maybe this is all well and good, but Mr Bisram and others should be really looking at what is done or left undone by the incumbent lot. I do not recall Mr Bisram, however, referring to any of the many scams exposed or referred to as having occurred since 1992.
Let me mention one or two to refresh Mr Bisram’s mind. There was a stone scam, then there was that book scam; and there was that milk scam, and the (whatever you call it) with those dolphins for which one Mr Khalawan took or was given the rap.
And coming down nearer, there have been so many runnings closer to the wind: the casino story, the BMW story, and all those stories about drug-running and money- laundering that the democratic incumbents do not seem able to deal with.
And there was this one about the Lotto funds that were not being deposited into the consolidated fund- until very recently.
Now those are current affairs, that should interest both Mr Bisram and those Guyanese who so readily meet him and pat him on the back, when he writes about Burnham.
But I suspect that he would get a different kind of pat on the back if he were to be so rash as to touch those subjects, and show his face in those areas of New York that he seems to roam in.
And do not tell me about Dick Morris. Really, I would have thought that that man had fallen off the edge of the planet, after those outrageous predictions in his poll did not even come near to what he had led his employers to expect.
For me, the British Privy Council (or the government concerned) ought to have long done the decent thing and recognized the incongruity of that entity continuing to adjudicate in appeals from what are independent nations. Perhaps those nations do not care to be more self-managing, even though I think that I did hear that, when the present T&T opposition was in government, they had contemplated getting out from under that Privy Council. Well it seems that what is good for one time, is not good for another. Look how comfortable the present Guyana bosses now are with the so-called Burnham 1980 Constitution.
But I suppose that this fair-minded pollster, Mr Vishnu Bisram has not noted all these things. I suppose too, that he has never thought that he should wonder what the Caricom situation would have been like today, had the Great Burnham not passed away when he did. For me, things like CSME would have been alive and running on well-oiled wheels, even if that Caribbean Man had to take the stragglers by the scruffs of their necks and get them moving.
Anyway, Editor, I am done with this one-sided pollster, for the time being.
He has exposed himself for the biased person he is, and I would leave him to his ways – unless, of course, he comes up with something new.
Yours faithfully,
Walter A Jordan
