I HAVE been sitting on the pages of all the major newspapers in Guyana since October 1988. This takes me close to 35 years.
In those long years, I’ve stood alone, touching subjects, confronting issues, ruminating on topics and reflecting on odds and ends that no other Guyanese could not be bothered to pronounce on or just too inhumane to think about.
Some of these social contents in Guyanese society were so heart-breaking and sadistic that you had to be pessimistic about the human condition. I knew since I was a very small boy that people cross from the Corentyne into Suriname in a speed boat, and that was an everyday occurrence without any customs or immigration hassle.
A few years ago, I read where a teenage girl was charged for taking that ride and was jailed. Yes, you are reading right. She was jailed for three months by a magistrate. A youth who had invaded a hotel in Number 63 village and mutilated the security guard and the owner was sentenced a few months ago by Justice Morris-Ramlall to time served for being on remand.
The time was 36 months. But this girl harmed no one. She went in search of a better life and was jailed.
I cannot say in this newspaper what I would have done if that hotelier was my father. But on the programme I own – the Gildarie-Freddie Kissoon Show – I will state this evening, what I would have done. Not one other human being wrote or said anything about how that Berbice girl was treated.
An Amerindian man found a spent shell on the roadway and was jailed by a magistrate for two years. No one rejected that travesty. When I read about this miscarriages of justice, I immediately approached my wife about what we should do about a spent shell we had in the house that we kept for subsequent use by my daughter if she ever she decides to write my biography.
I acquired the spent shell after my home on Hadfield Street, Wortmanvile, was shot at and one of the bullets lodged in my bed head literally a few inches from my wife’s head.
I have written about this experience three times before, so I am not going to dwell on it again. It was during the time of the Buxton insanities from 2002 to 2006. I was investigating the Buxton mayhem in its entirety from the Mash 2002 jail break to the alleged involvement of the opposition politicians from the PNC and WPA.
What I investigated, I wrote about in 20 pieces for the Kaieteur News and the Chronicle. Up to this day, I have not named names who were involved but my writings on Buxton attracted two types of reaction.
I got a libel writ from Tacuma Ogunseye which I successfully defended through my lawyer, Anil Nandlall and of course the shooting. Some person or persons tried to harm me and my family.
We kept one of the spent shells so my child could know when she grew up what her father went through in his quixotic quest for justice and freedom in Guyana.
She has grown up, but I cannot locate the shell since I moved from Wortmanville to Turkeyen. It must be somewhere in the house, but if you could get charged and be jailed for possession of a spent shell, then, with the publication of this column, I’m inviting the police to search my home.
The Berbice girl and the Amerindian man are just the tips of the iceberg of my 35-year-old campaign to evoke a conscience in Guyanese. For doing so, I ended up being alone on my journey.
But I have endured and I will continue to write. The light sentence for the murder of that hotelier and his security guard was one of the lowest moments in my public life. Now another moment has arrived.
What goes through the mind of a human when they hear that a mother was walking home and a degenerate rapist made a pass at her, she brushed him off and he stabbed her to death and he will serve seven and a half years in jail? That was what Judge Priya Sewnarine-Beharry sentenced him to. Please see my column on Tuesday last for my analysis of this sentence and others like it.
If you did not read it, let me add that this convicted murderer has a bestial past. He was convicted for raping a 12-year-old girl and on another occasion, discharging a loaded firearm with intent to harm. How could he have been imprisoned for seven and a half years? I will tell you tonight what I would have done if that was my mother.