I AM quoting from a woman named Melinda Janki from her published letter in the newspapers of February 19. “A country’s success depends upon brain power – the ability to make the right decisions in an unstable and ever-changing world. Brain power requires well educated people.

You don’t need to be educated to be a Member of Parliament or a minister or President. You only need to be able to read English with “sufficient proficiency” so you can participate in the National Assembly. MPs can sit there, screeching incivilities at one another, voting for legislation that some of them do not understand. Test all future MPs and presidents so we can see if they are up to the job. The test must include critical thinking.”

I could literally, I mean literally write a book critical of those words and, in the end, I think people’s eyes will be opened. For now, a newspaper column will have to suffice. Before we announce who Melinda Janki is, let us go back to my article of Thursday, March 7 titled, “Nameless, faceless enemies at the gate.” It dealt with three consecutive days of anonymous full-page advertisements in the newspapers denouncing the oil industry. I need not dwell on the contents of that column but an important point about those three placements must be internalised by the Guyanese public.

Do you know why the payers of those messages chose not to be identified? There are two explanations – fear of being called ignorant because it is ignorance to say a developing economy like Guyana does not need the income from oil. The second fear is being accused of hypocrisy for denying Guyana an income to reduce poverty but you are super-wealthy. Those three-day placements cost $1.2 million and it was paid for by very wealthy people who will remain wealthy oil or no oil in Guyana.

Now for the glorification of education that Ms. Janki seems to think is a requirement for a country’s success. Ms. Janki delivered a talk at Moray House on Quamina Street owned by a wealthy woman who is the co-owner of the Stabroek News and who lives in the UK, Isabelle DeCaires. Ms. Janki’s lecture title was “Oil will not make Guyana richer but poorer.”
At an online discussion, Ms. Janki repeated that ignorant emanation.

I am an educated person and forgive my chauvinism but it is contextual when I say that I am far more educated than Ms. Janki and my education informs me that anyone that can say oil will make Guyana poorer is ignorant.
In terms of behavioural psychology, there is no relation between ignorance and non-education. Educated people can talk so much nonsense that they become an embarrassment to modern civilization. James Watson discovered the DNA and was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine.

Watson was ostracised by the world for an output of ignorance. He said the genetic make-up of Africans make them more sexually active than other races. There isn’t a shred of scientific evidence to support that and in fact other races may have a deeper libidinal drive than African people.

In Guyana there is a group of anti-government haters I refer to in my writings as The Usual Suspects (TUS), a majority of whom are closely known to Ms. Janki who are all educated people but whose ignorance would have threatened the stability of Guyana if it wasn’t for the pyrotechnical fact 99 percent of the Guyanese people have dismissed them. All of the members of TUS are well educated people.

Here now is a demonstration of how education and ignorance are not related. TUS wrote a letter asking the DPP to reduce 20 murder charges of an accused to the single charge of arson. The teenager allegedly set fire to a girl dormitory and 20 teens were burnt alive.
TUS also wanted counselling for the accused (if she is not guilty and did nothing wrong then she needs a good lawyer rather than counselling) and frequent visits by her parents.

In no other country on Planet Earth, a teenager sets fire to a building in which 20 humans died and the state charged them with arson only. That never happened in the world and will never ever happen once the world lives on. If this is not ignorance then ignorance cannot be defined.
Forty-two members of TUS published a letter in the Stabroek News of November 17 requesting the government to immediately cease oil production and, in their plea, advised the government that fossil fuel emissions kill African people. Only the African race was mentioned. I say unapologetically, I find Ms. Janki’s letter above an expression of ignorance. Give me every Member of Parliament in 2024 any day in preference to Ms. Janki.