Dear Editor,
A Free Press is pivotal and a requirement to hold Governments accountable
In economies where the Free Press is allowed to function independently, gross areas of neglect and injustices played out in the court of public opinion have the remarkable effect of being ameliorated if not solved completely and usually and in some cases even influence legal decisions in a court of law.
I wish to make reference to a letter written by Mr. Lincoln Lewis and prominently published in both yesterday’s Sunday Stabroek and Kaieteur News where these two newspapers simply will not publish letters from myself and others that are based on proven facts and actual events that occurred.
Mr. Lewis as someone of African descent is completely in his right to express his opinion especially in areas that hinge on matters that affect the Guyanese African community.
I quote from the gentleman’s letter:
“By virtue of the sheer numbers, Africans have been the single largest group that has not only kept the nation’s wheels of production turning but financed the state’s spending through taxes.”
“I am sure were African leaders attacking East Indians in similar manner members of the African community would have publicly condemned the conduct. The attacks are insidious, wicked and part of an overarching mindset, policy and programme to justify marginalising a section of society. These persons are ascribing to themselves what they feel should be given to the African community rather than what the community is entitled to. As the public is fed the diatribe that denigrates a race, there are acts presently being conducted to deprive Africans of their resources.”
Mr. Lewis paints a picture that African Guyanese are being marginalized and actively prevented to enjoy what is rightfully theirs and are being marginalized which, in my view, is complete unsupported nonsense.
I encourage Mr. Lincoln Lewis and also the Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Aubrey Norton who has made a somewhat similar call to present evidence here in the public domain where African Guyanese have been barred from employment, discriminated against and deprived thereof (barring conventional political appointments) based on their ethnicity by the People’s Progressive Party/Civic Government of Guyana.
In 1976 when I finished my secondary school education at the Berbice Education Institute, I could not find a job and was told directly that I need to join the PNC and be in receipt of that party’s card, I saw and experienced violence and discrimination meted out against Guyanese East Indians including myself that I simply do not wish to describe here.
In a 24 x 7 panel that included a silent Dr. Baytoram Ramharack, Dr. David Hinds said that any balancing of the ethnic composition of the law enforcement and other agency must be guaranteed by equal numbers of African entrepreneurial ownership of business in the nation’s private sector and further that African men were being unjustly targeted and murdered in Guyana; I lived in Guyana at that time and that is completely false and misleading.
This type of untruth and nonsense is allowed to fester and divide an already divided Guyanese nation that chooses its government primarily on the basis of ethnic allegiance and East Indian and African Guyanese vote not on policies that are completely absent in the national political campaigns but to exclude the other ethnic group from the corridors of power and government.
In Mr. Lewis’s nation, there is no attention or reference made to the levels of institutionalized corruption in the nation’s institutions, the corruption and unprofessional discharge of duty in the law enforcement agency, the ragtag 1980 Constitution etc.
The question is who speaks for the East Indian families who suffer in silence and like the African and Guyanese of mixed ethnicity who vote for the PNC-R Guyana, the East Indians vote for the People’s Progressive Party/Civic in an explicable jargon, the lesser of two evils.
A nation divided will always fall and live on its knees.
Yours faithfully,
Kris Kooblall
