I HAVE thousands and thousands of articles to prove the accusations I have made in my columns since 2020 and decades ago, so I am consistent in my condemnation of the political and social aberrations in Guyana.

I have been a critic of the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) for its non-service to Guyana for more than 20 years now, the same amount of years I have exposed the Stabroek News for politicised journalism and unmitigated bias.

On the live call-in programme of the Freddie Kissoon Show two weeks ago, there were many complaints about the shortcomings of the NIS. Co-host, Leonard Craig, undertook to collect the complaints with names and intervene with the NIS. On last Monday’s programme, Craig gave an account of his efforts.

He announced that 25 persons had their matters solved by the NIS with only five remaining to be sorted out. On the show, he read out the names of those five persons and asked that they contact him on air. One did. Craig is an individual who acted on his own. He has no office. He used his own money in his investigations.

Contrast Craig’s endeavours with the work of the GHRA. This body has an office off Brickdam, and is funded by international donors and Western embassies in Guyana; last year the GHRA got funding from the UK High Commission. No one in Guyana knows what work the GHRA does. No one complains to the GHRA about their plight.

I lectured at UG for 26 consistent years and in those two and a half decades, UG was the worst university in the world in terms of violation of the rights of students and staff (it probably still is and I will touch on that shortly).

Those students and staff had only one avenue to channel their grievances – the media. For decades, the letter sections of all the four dailies published some heart-breaking stories about crass administration at UG.

The GHRA never lifted a finger to help those helpless people in all the decades UG was violating their rights. The GHRA does not investigate human rights violations. If it does, Guyanese do not know.

The GHRA has an intimate relation with the SN, so the SN would publish the GHRA’s track record, but the GHRA never tells Guyana what it has done and is doing in Guyana. It does not make public anything it does — except issue press releases criticising the government.

The only time this nation hears about the GHRA is when the SN carries its periodic press releases on its front page. What the Leonard Craig NIS effort has exposed is the moral bankruptcy in certain sections of this nation.

Since 1979, there is a private human rights entity right here in Guyana and it does absolutely nothing to help the helpless and the violated. But you do not read or see any chastisement from the people who are obsessed with bad-mouthing an elected, democratic government.

Go to the letter section of the online edition of the SN, and the anti-PPP comments on the letters demonising the government, make you sick. These people before they go to bed at night, look under their beds to see if Irfaan Ali is there. When they wake up in the morning, they look under their bed to see if Irfaan Ali is there.

They have no moral decency to at least publish one word, just one word on the non-existence of the GHRA. They have no moral threads in their DNA to print at least one paragraph asking the SN how it could give so much coverage to an organisation, which Guyanese do not know about and an organisation that does not do any human rights work in the country.

And of course, it will not stop. The SN bloggers, the SN itself and the GHRA do not recognise that just over a month ago we had an election and the incumbent won and the incumbent won because voters did not think the government was a dictatorship.

Read the comments on the online edition of SN, read the editorials of SN and check the periodic press releases of the GHRA as the months wear on and there will be no recognition that Guyana has a democratic government.

It is left on individuals like Craig to do what the GHRA should have been doing. The EU embassy has a new ambassador. When his predecessor arrived in Guyana, a mere six months after he bestowed the embassy’s Human Rights Award on the Stabroek News. Maybe this new envoy will give it again to Stabroek News. And the circus will go on.

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.