Dear Editor,
Accountant, attorney and newspaper columnist, Mr Christopher Ram, truly is deserving of a national award for his relentless expositions of questionable managerial and financial decisions by the Bharrat Jagdeo administration, which otherwise would have gone unnoticed by most.
I truly wish Guyana had more newspaper columnists with Mr Ram’s business, financial acumen and daring to confront the government with hard facts about its wrongdoings. He is like a lone voice crying in a wilderness hoping someone somewhere will hear and take action.
And while I am sure he is widely read, at no time did I ever read in any of his columns or letters any references or attacks of a personal nature against the President or his subordinates. Any reference to a person is purely incidental because I don’t think he is that shallow to engage in personality pugilism in the press.
However, it is the attention to detail and clarity of his writings that not only expose the government but demand some sort of punitive or corrective action be taken that really gets to the government.
The President knows he is constitutionally protected against criminal indictments and civil lawsuits, and is answerable to no one, so he is not duly bothered by any wrongdoing in his government. What he and his government are so upset about are Mr Ram’s expositions that are read by members of the diplomatic community, and with the independent dailies now accessible to the world via internet, those expositions reach prominent people in distant places where the President has been looking to make a name for himself.
As someone opined recently, the President, like the late Forbes Burnham, realizes he has little credibility with the people in Guyana, so he has to find solace in foreign lands where people don’t know about his failure as a government leader. For the President, therefore, it is all about projecting and protecting his image and that of his government in the eyes of international financial donor governments and institutions, while playing to an international audience of his peers and other high profile figures that he is a world leader who cares about the earth and poor people. But one tour of Georgetown and some time spent focusing on the plight of Guyana’s poor will reveal to the world that he really doesn’t care about the earth or the poor; it’s all about projecting and protecting an image.
When he labelled the private media the new political opposition, he was worried and angry about the impression media reports were making of him and his government. When three well-known Indian Guyanese – Messrs Yesu Persaud, Freddie Kissoon and Christopher Ram – publicly exposed him and his government in a really negative light before the eyes of the PPP’s ethnic-based constituency, he couldn’t defeat their messages so he had to target them as messengers.
All of that said, the verbal vitriol vented by the President against Mr Ram at the Clico (Guy) clients’ meeting was so without equal among Caribbean governments that it has to go down in the region’s record books as a shameless lack of presidential poise under pressure to answer questions pertaining to people’s pockets and pocketbooks, and for which the government has questions to answer. Mr Ram reportedly was there as a Clico (Guy) client, but the President saw him as a columnist and derisively dismissed him as such. However, since the Bank of Guyana was appointed liquidator, then the Governor of the bank, not the President, was supposed to be the actual host of the meeting. That would have allowed Mr Ram, as a client, the right to ask questions, and even if the President didn’t want to answer, he could have passed the mike to the Governor.
By the way, Editor, permit me, for the umpteenth time, to correct those misinformed supporters of the President who think his government came to the rescue of the Clico (Guy) clients: He had no choice here, and not because he made a promise to pay, but because his government failed to ensure Clico (Guy) followed the Insurance Act rules that forbids the investment of more than 15% of funds overseas, and then failed to apply the act’s prescribed punitive measures against Clico (Guy).
Clico (Guy) is another failure of the Jagdeo government.
Yours faithfully,
Emile Mervin
