Dear Editor,
The courts of Guyana by now would have paid fitting tribute to the life and work of the late Benjamin E Gibson, Attorney at Law. I heard of his passing only the day after his funeral and was able to let Dr Kean Gibson know of my regret.
I should like to place on record three things about Mr. Gibson. First, he came out of the village system in Beterverwagting.
As a lawyer he was almost always successful in the courts representing public servants who had been wrongfully dismissed. He made a specialty of cases of dismissal without a hearing or a fair hearing. If he lost in a lower court he was always confident of winning “upstairs” as the lawyers called the Court of Appeal.
The rest may be seen as directly political, and should also be instructive.
He was one of many like the late Peter Britton, SC, Odel Adams, Cleveland Hamilton, Eleazar and others who did not allow race to blind them to violations of the people’s rights under a ruler of their race. They understood racial dignity and also the need for untouchable rights that persons of any race, gender or class could rely on. They understood the link between barbarism and civilisation, which is never a question of mere technology. They often were led in criminal cases by Attorney Doodnauth Singh who later became Attorney General of a PPP administration. They understood too that without advocates on the other side there would be no justice. If we let our own side erode rights because it is our own side we help to create a mindset hostile to rights for everyone. It becomes a matter of whose “time” it is and then life becomes a matter of what the courts used to call “malice aforethought”.
Although I often “played lawyer “and represented myself often, I never did so without sound legal preview by lawyers like Miles Fitzpatrick and the late Peter Britton SC and Benjamin Gibson.
These things have happened in Guyana especially under the PPP.
I remember our many conversations about the 1980 Constitution One of the things he said over and over was that under the immunity articles the President had no private identity. Many lawyers of the eighties refused to read the 1980 Constitution because of the way it was produced and the powers and immunities it created. Gibson, trained in England which has no written “constitution” had studied it keenly.
In a later letter I shall let the public have my version of how I networked with Gibson, Hughes before he became political and my WPA colleagues to use the courts against a learned Attorney General to remove a decisive abuse of presidential power.
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana
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