A LADY named Nakisha Sinclair has achieved overnight fame. She has accused the AFC of using her work in the current campaign season without sensitivity to copyright abuse and logical financial reward.

I never knew about the existence of this lady until her accusations against Nigel Hughes.
In her quarrel with Nigel, Ms. Sinclair wrote the following and as you read it, tell me if it doesn’t look like the lady has lifted parts of certain Guyana Chronicle columns of mine: “I find it sobering to watch how quickly voices go silent when the accused are no longer government actors but political allies.”
Those words are similar to many expressions in my columns the past four years. So, did Ms. Sinclair plagiarize my political analyses?
The answer is no. I believe the quote offered above is Ms. Sinclair’s own thoughts and she has a right to express them. But I want Ms. Sinclair to know that her thoughts put in words can be found in not five or ten columns of my past two years but dozens.

I have published dozens of columns in which incredibly illegal, morally offensive, and politically uncivilised things have been said and written by anti-government actors, but there is no ventilation of these issues in this country. You go to social media and the mainstream press and you are psychologically tortured by the inexorable castigations of even the most inconsequential errors of the Guyana government. It is relentless and in this pursuit of the PPP, some words become a stuck record.
The stuck record is about lack of accountability. But as Ms. Sinclair noted, there is a lack of accountability on the other side. Let me quote Ms. Sinclair once more: “Just months ago, several persons including members and affiliates of the AFC and other parties were vocal in their condemnation of the government for allegedly misappropriating the creative work of a fashion designer.”

I hope Ms. Sinclair knows this is the rotten part of Guyana, which she must play her part in exposing. I quote Ms. Sinclair for the third time: “The silence is deafening. The same people who demanded accountability are now curiously mute. If your commitment to integrity only applies when your opponents are the accused, it is not integrity. Had my issues been with the government, the headlines would have been loud.”
I hope Ms. Sinclair is aware that the way she has put it, I have done so in dozens of columns. I will spend the rest of this column educating Ms. Sinclair on the existence of hypocrisy in certain circles of society and these hypocrites should not be accepted by the Guyanese people and the sooner Guyana as a country ostracises them, the more secure the future of Guyana’s young generation will be.

We start with the silence Ms. Sinclair so laments. The son of the former Chancellor of the Judiciary had a confrontation with the female security. All hell broke loose. The young man was crucified in the private newspapers for mistreatment of women. But Mr. Lincoln Lewis was charged by the police for physical assault of a woman half his size and the silence was deafening.
The same Lewis was sued for copyright infringement by the original owner of an online newspaper named Village Voice and Mr. Lewis lost. And there was reverberating silence. Under the constitution of the Guyana Press Association, its president is allowed two terms of two-year duration. The current president, Ms. Nazima Raghubir is in her eighth year, four of which there was no election for office bearers. And the silence is very loud.
The current co-president of a frenetic anti-government civil society group with the title, Guyana Human Rights Association, is a trade unionist named Norris Witter. This very gentleman, when asked on the Freddie Kissoon Show to speak on the attempted rigging of the 2020 national elections, said openly that he doesn’t know about any election rigging in March 2020. And the silence is nauseating.
The Stabroek News informed a retired university professor, Dr. Randolph Persaud, who is the adviser to the President of Guyana that they cannot carry his letters because they attack civil society organisations. This ugly and sickening blow to free speech was met with the sound of silence.
I just randomly picked these examples as I was typing but I could cite hundreds, yes, hundreds of situations of the kind of which Ms. Sinclair is now protesting against. We have a social disease here in Guyana where people who criticise the government are far worse than any low- or high-level figure in the corridors of power. These people are misfits that have no right to criticise any citizen in Guyana much less the elected government.

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.