TERRENCE Campbell, the man the AFC proposed to be the consensus candidate if there was a PNC-AFC coalition for the 2025 election, said publicly that if approved, he would have accepted the offer. This meant Campbell wanted to be President of Guyana.

Campbell also made another public announcement. He reminded the nation that he has been a successful businessman for 40 years. When you consider that Campbell is in his early sixties, it means Campbell spent the greater part of his life making money. Then there are two public cynical outputs from Campbell, laughing at the fact that I did not complete my doctorate.

I will now explain to Campbell why I did not complete my PhD at the University of Toronto and in so doing I will compare my life with that of Campbell’s and let the Guyanese nation in and out of the land decide if between Campbell and I who is more a Caribbean man and a Guyanese nationalist.

After completing the compulsory two years of doctoral preparation with the achievement of certification, I now had to submit my thesis, which was almost complete. But I got an offer of a lifetime. The Prime Minister of Grenada, Maurice Bishop, a former boyfriend of my sister in Barbados, agreed to my sister’s request for me to work with him.

I travelled to Grenada in 1983 and worked closely with Bishop in a very confidential way without interfacing with the rest of the Cabinet except the Foreign Minister, Unison Whiteman. This was a memorable experience I will never forget. Maurice Bishop was a unique human who, if he had lived, would have transformed the CARICOM family of nations in phenomenal ways.

Honestly, since the time of Maurice Bishop, I haven’t seen a leader across the independent CARICOM nations who matches his uniqueness, except for Irfaan Ali of Guyana. I am getting on in age, but maybe in Ali’s second term, I may work for him in the way I worked for Bishop.

The Grenada Revolution imploded, a tragedy that perhaps has set back the Caribbean by maybe a hundred years, and I returned to Guyana. Professors, Clive Thomas, Harold Lutchman and Rudy James (Rudy is deceased and will remain one of my favourite Guyanese) organised a lecture job for me at UG but President Burnham atavistically reverted to his demonic self when in 1979 I graduated with the President’s Medal and he prevented my employment in my own country.

Burnham died, President Hoyte lifted Burnham’s fatwa on me, and I taught for 26 years at UG until President Donald Ramotar terminated my contract. When I started teaching at UG, I got residence status in two countries, but I refused to leave UG. I could not believe what I was seeing at UG.

My students had never heard of Sigmund Freud or the Holocaust. That’s when I decided to stay in Guyana and teach philosophy to local students. I introduced them to every great philosopher since Socrates in ancient Athens. UG was in a terrible mess. No building in UG was of a modern standard. UG has no facilities that you would find in the 21^st century.

When my contract was terminated in 2011, I was earning $169,000 monthly. In that time, Campbell, by his own admission, was a successful businessman. Maybe I am wrong, but what I earned for 26 years at UG, Campbell earned in one month. I wrote two Chronicle columns about my disapproval of having to pay $960 for an ice cream cone at Campbell’s business, Burger King.

I stated with unambiguous grammar that I could not afford to buy a cone for $960. That, of course, is an amount that Campbell probably gives to the roadside mendicants each day. Let me explain this to you, Terrence—after 26 years at UG, there was simply no room to save. That’s why I can’t afford a $960 cone.

You should tell us, Terrence, how much you saved in those 40 years you said you were a successful businessman. Ravi Dev has publicly said, Terrence that you are a billionaire.

So, Terrence Campbell, that is the story of my lost doctorate. I chose to serve Grenada and Guyana while the doctorate languished. I did ask UG while I was a lecturer there to fund my travel to the University of Toronto to submit the thesis, because it was almost complete. But Vice-Chancellor James Rose said UG didn’t have that kind of money to spend on an irrelevant (his word, not mine) airline ticket.

I have no regrets putting Grenada and UG in front of the doctorate. I left UG knowing that thousands of students of mine now knew who Sigmund Freud is and what philosophy is all about. I still meet a few who remind me of the philosophers I taught them.

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.