TWICE I read where Vice President, Bharat Jagdeo urged PPP supporters to use the press and social media to expose people that spread fictions, propaganda and damnations (my word) against the government. There is a simple reason why he said that. There is a school of relentless critics out there that need to be confronted because there are facts to confront them with.

In 2023, so many wrong, nasty, ugly, decayed, and immoral things were publicly tossed around in this country that I wondered what happened to the rich, political and intellectual country I grew up in. That horizon has evaporated making Guyana’s climate of intellectual freedom precarious.

In 2023, the terrible things that occurred here should never have gone without a fight because the ambience of debate frees people’s mind. Intellectual discourse frees people’s mind. After 35 years in the media, I don’t know where to start to tell readers of the occasions when people have met me or telephoned me or sent emails with the following words: “I did not know that happened.”

If we continue to be unresponsive to nasty agendas within society, oil money is not going to save us. Look what happened in the US to the first Black Haitian-American president of an Ivy League University – Harvard. Because of her response to right-wing Republican in Congress about anti-Semitism, she was hounded out of her job. This is the danger facing free speech in the US. Read her explanation why she was harassed.

The largest indication of the danger that awaits us in 2024 is our silence on issues that are crucial to democracy in Guyana, and the threats are not coming from government but people with an intense anti-government agenda. And these people are not from within the opposition parties but from the private media and civil society organisations.

Let’s offer examples in the hope that it can provide clarity for those who need to understand what happened in 2023. Let’s start with the private media. In which part of the world, a newspaper would openly tell a presidential adviser that it cannot carry his letters to the editor if they are critical of certain civil society groups?

When Dr. Randy Persaud told me that, I immediately rang the editor-in-chief of the Stabroek News, Mr. Anand Persaud. Here is what one of the country’s leading newspapers told one of the country’s leading columnists –“I will not discuss that with you.”

Do you know there was complete silence from the persons who write in the Stabroek News, many of whom would criticise the government on some policy matter or governmental mistake? Some of the names included Dr Baytoram Ramharack, Dr. Tarron Khemraj, Dr. Percy Hintzen, Vishnu Bisram, Ravi Dev. Why were they silent? Because they feared the Randy Persaud treatment. There was not one voice or pen from inside of Guyana or in the Guyanese diaspora that denounced what the Stabroek News did to Dr. Persaud.

At the beginning of 2023, a group within the anti-oil lobby wrote a letter demanding that the government get out of the fossil fuel industry and one of the harms they listed is the life-threatening effects carbon emissions have on the people of Africa. They actually mentioned Africa and named no other race or continent.

Such a statement is pregnant with racial preferences. When I was a UG student in the mid-1970s, there would have been swift condemnation of that statement. In Guyana and at UG there would have been fulminations against this letter which was written by prominent non-Indian Guyanese including university lecturers at foreign institutions.

The act of naming only African people as victims of the emissions from the fossil fuel industry tells you about the Freudian mind of those who criticise the government and you ask yourself if these people have any moral compass as social activists. More worrying is that to date, there is no denunciation from those whose moral duty is to do just that.

In 2023, there was the irony of hilarity and depravity rolled up into one ugly package. A group came here from the US to investigate racial discrimination. I asked them why not Israel when more of their tax dollars go to Israel than Guyana. For every American dollar, Guyana receives as aid Israel gets 10 million dollars, why were they coming here?

Finally, in 2023, we were told by the opposition PNC and AFC that there was a creeping apartheid in Guyana. In denouncing such political degeneracy in my column for the Kaieteur News, the owner of the paper, Mr. Lall called me to ask me if I am blind; if I am not seeing apartheid in Guyana. That brought an end to my 30-year-old relationship with Kaieteur News. The anti-government bandwagon was silent.