YOU have to be silly or dishonest to think that Mr. Glen Lall, the owner of Kaieteur News, did not know that Mr. Su was not in Guyana.
Mr. Su has disappeared from Guyana. No one knows where he is. Last week, Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo indicated that he may ask the court to levy on Mr. Su because he failed to contest a libel writ filed by Mr. Jagdeo.

It takes less than commonsense to know that Mr. Su will not surface and attend a PPP fund-raising activity, sitting alongside top Cabinet members. Once you hear that, you know it is fake news, and you investigate.

Mr. Lall chose not to take that route. Mr. Lall is just lashing out against the government and he is not interested in the fall of Kaieteur News (KN). Mr. Lall’s agenda has killed off KN a long time ago.

I was one of the persons who were part of the original group of people that enlarged the idea of Mr. Lall of starting a newspaper. At the beginning, I committed myself to contributing to its functionalism in three ways and I achieved that until Mr. Lall awoke one day and discovered that he wanted to be a journalist.

First, I wanted the paper to go far beyond the reach of Stabroek News (SN) which catered for the middle and upper classes. I wanted KN to be a newspaper that appealed to every strata and classes in Guyana. Our team included Michael Jordan, Dale Andrews, Adam Harris, Leonard Gildarie, Sharmaine Granger and a few others.

Secondly, I wanted KN to focus on every aspect of news; not news the details of which were fit only for office people. I can remember in the early days saying umpteen times we must write about what goes on in the fish markets.

Thirdly, in keeping with my philosophical DNA, I wanted KN to have no sacred cows. It must be fiercely independent in its approach to reporting the contents of Guyana, including politics, business, social occurrences, crime, among other things. Those were the three aims I had when I started at KN from the time it was born.

Dale Andrews (deceased) was my personal friend and Guyana’s best crime journalist. I had a gigantic quarrel with his approach to crime reporting. When a businessman was being investigated for an alleged offence, he would not name the person but he always printed the names of those from the poorer sections of society who were in the same position as the businessman and he would also mention their alleged offences.

I vociferously confronted him one day and told him that was not journalism; that was not the reason I was at Kaieteur News. He agreed and that was one of the changes I brought at KN.
The team I was part of succeeded in all three of those aims. By the time we held a celebration for the 10th anniversary of KN, it had outpaced the circulation of SN. During the period of insanity in Buxton between 2002 and 2005, the KN sold more copies daily than any paper in the history of Guyana, including the time of racial violence of the first three years of the 1960s.

I was the main actor for the paper in investigating the situation in Buxton. I think I did 13 columns of investigative journalism that endangered the lives of me and my wife.
Those 13 columns have omitted details that would only be revealed when certain political participants are dead. If I die before them, then Guyanese history will be robbed of stories that should be part of Guyana’s historiography.

The team had done what I always wanted KN to do – reach all strata of the Guyanese society. I got responses for my columns from the diplomatic community, the upper classes in society and the people from the fish markets.

KN had become the number one paper in Guyana. In that period, Mr. Lall played a very minor role. He was proud of his achievement – he birthed the idea of a newspaper, financed it and it was now a success. His presence was confined to that quarter.

One day, about 15 years ago, the team had a strange encounter. Mr. Lall wanted to enter the world of journalism. It took everyone by surprise. The paper was on top of the world, it had talented people in its journalistic work and it was bringing “nuff” money from sales and advertisement.

It was a business for Mr. Lall. But suddenly Lall wanted to switch from business to journalism. This had to be the beginning of the end. We were both alarmed and amused. Mr. Lall was not equipped with elementary grammar to be part of the paper’s journalism. Part two to follow.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.