LAST WEEK, I returned to a topic that I have written upon more than once – objectivity in political discourse – only this time with a little more depth and urgency than I have before, particularly since we are after all deep into an election year.
This week, I want to start off by referring to something that all my readers should be familiar with, the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year.

In the wake of that unprecedented ecological disaster, the Obama administration came under heavy public criticism for its response to the disaster.  The partisan attacks from the Republican party were absurd in their variation: one category of criticism claimed Obama did not respond fast enough, while another claimed  he was in collusion with British Petroleum to cause the catastrophe in the first place, while yet another considered his forthright public scouring of the tragedy as Un-American.

We can take the recent flooding in Lethem for example, clearly a natural disaster if there was ever one.  While the region has been subject to an annual cycle of flooding, it is doubtful that anyone could have predicted with any certainty the amount of water that would have swept over the township and its environs two weeks ago.

Yet, the unpredictability of this event notwithstanding, we’ve had criticism, without a shred of evidence provided, that the government’s response in this crisis was lacklustre and otherwise wanting in substance.  This is how the tragic illogic of partisan politicking works – if it is that we were to take at face value that the Government of Guyana was as opportunistic and as self-interested as this school of propaganda claims, what would be the realpolitik gain – with the resources at its disposal – in neglecting the hard-hit residents of the Rupununi, particularly in an election year?

The reality is that the official response – supported by those of other entities and stakeholders, including the limited input of the political opposition itself – has averted the natural disaster becoming a human tragedy.  From the Civil Defence Commission to the various ministries, what we saw was a system that worked, in contrast, say, to the FEMA response to Katrina in the US, something I referenced in the first article.

Another area in which  I see unwarranted partisan criticism is that of education.  Teachers constitute a sizeable portion of the population, around 10,000 according to some estimates, but their work impacts upon virtually the entire nation.  A proper education system is one of those non-negotiable elements of a country’s development, and teachers are muscles of that system, the basic means by which that system moves forward.  Therefore, the issue of remuneration of teachers that has been used time and again for political mileage is clearly an area that should attract objective and non-partisan discourse.

Not only do I see the politicization of education as unethical but also outright harmful in the long run.  No government has access to unlimited resources and while a critical aspect of the investment in education should be in human resources, salaries constitute a recurring expenditure that if unsustainable in the long run – particularly one that supports 10,000 livelihoods – and if the periodic opposition-inspired agitation were to be appeased, would see the eventual collapse of the entire system, or the cutting short of other crucial areas of education expenditure, like infrastructural development for example.

Finally, I want to state that I don’t believe that the vast majority of people who are in politics get into it with a partisan agenda at the forefront of their intentions.  I think, like boys arguing in a schoolyard, what happens is that eventually – particularly for the party that feels more threatened – what is expressed becomes more of a pandering to the gathering onlookers than anything of substance in itself.

To return, by way of example, to the post-spill attacks on Obama, when you get to the source of the attacks however, you realize three things – how ultimately inconsequential the originators of those criticisms were; the amount of leeway they were given in terms of lack of censure or the silence of more objective voices within their own party; and the level to which those criticisms were aggrandized, magnified and modified by the media, particularly those aligned to the far right wing, Fox News of course being chief among them.

I mention that situation to introduce my belief – and this is no way reflective of my official position of Chairman of the Board of a national newspaper – that a substantial part of our problem with political objectivity stems from this very phenomenon, that of partisan media being used to promote partisan interests, which is not wrong in itself, but just obscene when it comes to certain situations.

While I don’t believe we have quite the equivalent of a Fox News here in Guyana, I try to imagine a situation wherein some politicians were free of the partisan politics enabling tool that is some sections of the media, and what I see in my mind is them getting off their soapboxes and reconnecting to the reasons they got into politics in the first place, i.e., to make a real difference in the lives of people.