Dear Editor,
I respond to a statement put out by four PPP/C members on the UG Council. I believe my clarifications are not necessary because all the dimensions of the council’s actions have been publicly ventilated. What the statement by these PPP Councillors has done is to further expose the bankruptcy of the PPP leadership of Guyana. In every paragraph, the misrepresentations are so blatant that it gives concerned UG employees a chance to speak to the Guyanese people to demand changes at UG.
Here is a point by point exposure of the egregious fictions in the statement of Bibi Shadick, Nirmal Rekha, Indra Chandarpal and Gail Teixeira. Strangely, Prem Misir did not put his name to it.
1. Why at a university that is falling to pieces, the PPP Councillors (note, only the PPP Councillors) are concerned with the way qualified academics received their contracts and are so obsessed with it that they demanded a special sitting in October? At a university which hardly has lecturers, surely, the reason must be questioned. And the reason is to get at certain lecturers, particularly myself, Dr Patrick Williams and Lorrie Bancroft, former Deputy Head of Customs prior to 1992, and Mr Vincent Alexander
2. I worked for twenty-six years at UG with no complaints about my academic performance. Last September, my faculty awarded me a contract to teach courses for which there was no applicant. A similar situation existed throughout the university.
3. UG’s retirement age is 60, with the faculties having the right to employ an academic up to sixty-five based of absence of competition for the particular courses they teach. Senior lecturers and professors can go beyond sixty-five, again providing there is no competition. The sixty-five age provision has been the order of the day since 1983, because since then filling vacancies at UG has been difficult. This is a fact all Guyanese are aware of. There are more than twenty-five lecturers at UG who are either over sixty, over sixty-five or over seventy. The current Vice Chancellor is seventy, his predecessor served when he was over sixty-five, the Bursar is over sixty-five.
4. There were 14 persons at the meeting. I was not invited even though I am a legal member of the council. Of the 14 present, three are servants of the council and cannot vote – the Registrar, the Bursar, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor. It means then that fourteen persons could not have voted as asserted by the four PPP Councillors.
5. No one in Guyana can be so foolish to think after serving UG for twenty-six years, suddenly the academics and administrators at UG in January 2012 discovered that I wasn’t a good performer and wanted my services terminated one week before UG opens.
6. UG Council, based on the statutes of UG, has to act on a complaint of non-performance. No such complaint was ever tendered to the council by anyone against me either at UG or Guyana at large.
7. Under the statutes, dismissal has to be done after an investigation when the accused would have been giving a hearing. The latest case of that was Evan Persaud, accused of sexual misconduct in the classroom.
8. For some unknown reason, the five PPP Councillors have ordered UG not to employ me at any level whatsoever. There is no statutory backing for such a tyrannical decision. The four PPP Councillors conveniently left that out of their statement.
9. Why Dr Williams and Mr Bancroft were reduced to part time status is not a matter for council. Only faculties can decide the status of employment of a lecturer once the lecturer is qualified. Dr Williams and Mr Bancroft are highly qualified, thus part-time employment is humiliating.
10. This is where the real fight lies with the academics and this particular council, and that is to take back all the authority and administrative rights of the academics that the PPP dominated council removed.
11. I don’t have to expand on replacements. My Dean, O’Neil Greaves spoke to Stabroek News on this. There is no replacement for me at the moment.
12. How strange that Ms Shadick, Ms Teixeira, Mr Rekha and Ms Chandarpal were waiting a week for UG to speak on my firing, and this is the very UG that voted against me for not performing. Surely, speaking about it should not have been difficult.
13. Can someone from the opposition and other stakeholders ask Ms Shadick and Ms Teixeira which constituency they represent on the council.
14. The four PPP Councillors did not mention the Vincent Alexander case where of three appointments that have to be advertised publicly, the council has chosen to advertise only Mr Alexander’s position as Registrar. The last time the position came vacant, Ms Bibi Shadick applied. When her application came in front of me when I served on the council, I argued that it was a conflict of interest, she being a council member and applying for a job that the very council has to fill. I voted against Ms Shadick because Mr Alexander was better qualified. Finally, at the tripartite meeting of PPP, APNU and AFC on Monday, the restructuring of the council is on the agenda.
The council has to do away with appointments of the PPP politicians and government politicians and politicians in general. At present there are eleven of them. It is a horrible situation that must come to an end.
Yours faithfully,
Frederick Kissoon
