Dear Editor,
I refer to a letter in yesterday’s SN by UG lecturer, Sherwood Lowe (`Election campaigning and columnists’). His comments about Stabroek News’ need to remove its columnists who are anti-government are arrogant and dangerous because he arrogates to himself the use of an “invincible” methodology of deciding who is pro and anti.
He singled out Tarron Khemraj as anti-government and said that he should be removed from Stabroek News’ pages. The danger with Lowe’s thinking is that if Khemraj sees the use of governance in Guyana as controversial and needing to be analyzed, he becomes anti-government. This is pathetic nonsense. Criticizing power has been the essential role of academics long before Socrates was executed thousands of years ago.
I have known Sherwood Lowe a long time as a fellow academic at UG though I have never had a conversation with him and never cared to. I have always regarded Lowe as an unapologetic supporter of the PNC but unlike so many others who endorse political positions openly, Lowe would obfuscate his partisanship using what he, Lowe thinks is sophisticated language.
I don’t think anyone at UG was impressed. People in the unions and at UG, and readers know where his loyalties lie. I was never in doubt. Lowe it must be said was once a PNC parliamentarian. I doubt Tarron Khemraj was ever a member of a political party much less a parliamentarian.
There was no more graphic example of Lowe’s perennial double standards than during the UG’s unions’ confrontation with the recent, former Vice Chancellor, Ivelaw Griffith. Using what he believes is a style that can influence people, he resorted to every political stratagem to convince the unions on other directions. They didn’t work.
The unions knew what they were doing was non-political and in the interest of their constitution which they had an obligation to serve. That constituency was UG employees. During the four years of the PNC in government, Lowe has written dozens of letters on dozens of different subjects. But strangely, not one has ever been penned on terrible governance at UG.
When I read Lowe’s crude differentiation as to who is pro-and who is anti-government, I saw the usual arrogance and obfuscation. Why are columnists the only people prevented from expressing political stances? Why not UG lecturers who teach students who support different types of political parties?
Why not ministers who must serve the nation without political bias but use the nation’s resources to undertake political campaigns. The past year, money from the Treasury is being used under the guise of Cabinet outreaches to pursue political campaigns.
There are times when these outreaches caricatured into open party demagoguery as what happened in Bartica two months ago. Why not the Chronicle which under Lowe’s party has remained the same political footcloth it was under PPP presidents? It would be nice to hear Lowe’s thoughts on these depravities.
Maybe now that he has moved away from his subtle hiding of his political determinism, Lowe can enlighten us on his attitude to Volda Lawrence who was recorded as saying that her ideological habit is to employ persons who are PNC because only PNC people she knows; only PNC people are her friends. Is Lowe telling us that Stabroek News must drop Khemraj because he is anti-government but Granger must keep Lawrence?
Readers obviously would know why Lowe picked on Khemraj. The latter exposed the dangerous thinking of Lowe in his column recently when Lowe justified the concatenation of unconstitutional actions of the government since the no-confidence vote.
Lowe contended that PNC constituencies felt they were being cheated out of their entitlements by the cutting short of the government’s term in office. So for Lowe, only one set of entitlements are recognized. Maybe sugar workers for Lowe don’t matter.
Yours faithfully,
Frederick Kissoon
