– With verbal assault on Guyana Chronicle

WEDNESDAY’s unprovoked verbal assault by Carol Smith-Joseph on Tamica Garnett, a female reporter at the Guyana Chronicle, represents another chapter of systematised attacks against the fourth estate by the People’s National Congress (PNC).

The hurling of expletives at the reporter to avoid legitimate questions about the PNC candidates for Local Government Elections (LGE) must be roundly condemned by all right-thinking Guyanese and civil society organisations.

Smith-Joseph’s subsequent backhanded apology essentially espouses the initial injurious insults as justifiable based upon the baseless and unsubstantiated premise of media bias.
The apology further exposes the Opposition as being willing bystanders in sacrificing transparency and accountability on the altar of political expediency.

Smith-Joseph has a lot to gain from intimidating reporters who have been updating the nation on her 14 counts of fraud with which she is charged for the alleged theft of $6.1 million from the Mahaica Abary Rice Development Scheme (MARDS) while a member of its Board of Directors.

For many, this latest venomous approach to reporters by the former petroleum advisor under the David Granger administration, is predictable based on her thuggish public outbursts in the past.

Many still recall her verbal battering of reporters who were invited to Congress Place by her party’s leader to cover a press conference on the 2018 LGE.

The PNC must prove both in words and actions that the party’s leadership is serious about the protection and upliftment of women across Guyana by taking decisive action to relieve Smith-Joseph of all leadership positions within the party’s women group.

Leadership within the PNC, both past and present, has so far proven unwilling to rein in and restrain Smith-Joseph because she serves the party’s mob-like agenda as an enforcer; intimidating anyone, including supporters, who are seen as a threat to the paramountcy of the party.

The PNC’s track record where accountability to the citizenry is an alien concept is alive and well. In the well-documented history of dictatorship, the PNC while in government, directed the state apparatus to intimidate and inflict pain against journalists who refused to ignore the atrocities taking place at the time.

Reporters in the state media, like their counterparts in the private media, have an inherent constitutional right to exist and exercise their freedom to express themselves as citizens of Guyana while carrying out their mandated duties.