LAST week, in an appearance before the UN Human Rights Committee, Minister Gail Teixeira told the gathering; “Voices of a loud, well-financed few cannot determine the fate of a country.”
Because she is a Minister, Ms. Teixeira has to be diplomatic and observe protocol, so she couldn’t get into analysis about the reasons for the motives of this tiny cabal which lacks even a scintilla of support from the Guyanese people.

Before I come to the main argument, a relevant revelation needs mentioning. For 22 months I have been doing an interview programme named the Freddie Kissoon-Gildarie Show. The episode that got the highest number of viewers was the second interview with Attorney-General, Anil Nandlall. The second highest viewership was Charrandass Persaud, last month with numbers hitting the roof. The Stabroek News carries on a campaign against Charrandass and frequently refers to him as a disgrace.

Yet this man had an extremely high viewership. What is this here? It takes the form of a question – who speaks for the Guyanese people? Who do the Guyanese people listen to and admire or respect? If you take the position of the European, UK and American governments on the Gaza tragedy, the bias in favour of Israel borders on barefacedness.

Yet the peoples of Europe, the US and UK do not share the sentiments of their pro-Israel leaders. The Democratic Party of the US has realised this and is now in desperation mode to distance itself from the tragedy to win elections in November. The question is do we know what the people want when we invoke their name?

The anti-oil lobby is a stuck record. But do the Guyanese people listen to them? Do the Guyanese people know who they are and have any respect or even admiration from them? I have been writing about the voices of these wealthy people since the Ali presidency came into being in August 2020.

The activism of these people is shamelessly based on class and colour. And their wealth has made them pompous and arrogant that they believe in their superiority with the contemptuous reaction that they must not be criticised. One incident stands out about these wealthy people that needs to be put in perspective.

Mr. Ralph Ramkarran wrote a column in which he took issue with these so-called civil society groups. He made the point that they only focus on issues that have sex appeal (his words) and argued that there are several areas of social anomalies that these groups should spend time and energy on. For penning those words, Mr. Ramkarran said he got a “good cussing up.”

The attitude of these wealthy folks is clear – do not criticise us. For making a valid point, Mr. Ramkarran was verbally abused. I offer you a second example – Article 13, a group that consists of some of the people Minister Teixeira made reference to. This group intervened to stop a column of mine critical of them in the Kaieteur News. Then they published a libelous attack on me in the same newspaper. When I asked a friend of mine, Jonathan Yearwood, who is in the Article’s 13 leadership, how he can approve of such an attack, he said the letter and the decision to publish was the work of two persons only in Article 13.

Minister Teixeira in reference to these people coined the label, “the tyranny of the minority” and it is a graphic description. There are dozens of civil society groups in this country but a small number of these entities behave as if they speak for the entire community of civil society organisations and you have media houses that only give coverage to this minority.

On the question of these wealthy citizens that Minister Teixeira said will not be allowed to determine the fate of Guyana, one has to understand where their small influence lies. It resides in the enormous wealth they have. I can tell you with pellucid forcefulness, there are hundreds, not dozens, but hundreds of wrong-doings in this country whose victims are from the low-income classes, and they have no money to employ high priced lawyers.

The tyranny of the minority is allowed to exist because they spend their wealth on high-priced lawyers to harass the government. They have been engaged in 15 court cases against the oil industry with lawyers whose collective fees for those cases I have put at $90 million plus they spent $1.2 million in anti-oil advertisements during the energy conference last month. The tyranny of the minority is about bourgeois class warfare against the government that is disliked for reasons of class and colour. Their activism and narratives must be confronted