Some folks formerly with the Stabroek News (KN) have birthed an online newspaper titled Kiskadee Watch. See my column of Thursday, June 11, 2026, “The birth of an anti-government kiskadee.” I was under no illusion that the new kid on the block would be like the old kid that died in March this year. But I honestly thought that those folks would have learned from the past.
I need to digress in order to reinforce my point. The 2025 election results revealed that people rejected David Hinds, Tacuma Ogunseye, the PNC and others of their ilk who came across as zealously pro-racial and not multi-racial. The SN and Kaieteur News (KN) didn’t participate in the election, but you can say that the electorate also repudiated their politics based on the results.
People were simply fed up with the one-track mind of SN, KN, PNC, Hinds, Ogunseye, Henry Jeffrey etc. It was the same thing each day. When it came to KN, it was oil, oil and nothing else. Based on the daily lashes the PPP got as the ruling party got from these folks for five years, then, the PPP should have been devastated.
The opposite happened. APNU, with Hinds, Ogunseye, and Jeffrey, got badly bruised to the point where the PNC may no longer be a viable force in 2030. SN went out of business and KN, in order to survive, has doubled the price of the printed paper since the beginning of this month. I was reliably informed that since that decision, KN’s sale has gone further down. My prediction is that KN’s printed version may not see the light of 2027; the paper is losing money badly.
But people never learn and that is one of life’s unfortunate instincts. So we have the birth of Kiskadee Watch, and the people behind that entity have learned nothing from the past. As I wrote above, I was not surprised at the shape it would take, but how about a little change which dictates that you must learn from the past? Since the Kiskadees started their publication, every editorial is critical of the government. You mean the government does do anything positive?
I looked at the columnists and it is the same old story. I anticipated that at least a writer slightly in favour of the government would have found space. But no; there is Mr. Anand Goolsarran. And there is the obnoxious presence of Bertrand Ramcharran.
Let me tell you something about Ramcharran after SN closed. He had a column in the KN, then, his contribution appeared as a letter. Then he disappeared. My source at KN told me that Ramcharran was informed that his pieces would be carried in the letter section but not as a column.
The kiskadees do not whistle, see or learn. What are they doing with Ramcharran? Should any newspaper, printed or online, in the Caribbean carry Ramcharran as a columnist? What can he teach a very young population like Guyana’s about the world? Do young Guyanese deserve to read Ramcharran? This man wrote an SN column glorifying Mossad.
He penned another column in which he noted that Guyanese parliamentarians can learn from a certain Speaker of the US House of Representatives. Not a Commonwealth parliamentary speaker but one from a superpower country. Why not invite Neville Bissember to do the global affairs column that Ramcharran does? Bissember lives here and teaches at UG. He is far more impartial analyst than Ramcharran.
What newspapers do is they invite scholars to do a column on a particular subject. But the kiskadee watchers will not invite anyone that analyzes the Government of Guyana in a positive way. A commonsensical thing for the kiskadee watchers to do is juxtapose the Chris Ram column with that of Joel Bhagwandin. Give Leonard Craig a weekly page. He writes analytically. Bet your last dollar, Alissa Trotz, who edits the Kiskadee Watch’s Diaspora page, is going to be her old self. She is anti-government, so the kiskadees she invites to whistle to the Guyanese diaspora will only be given an anti-government song.
Will the kiskadee watchers stare in the independent direction? They can’t because the leopard, the kiskadee, cannot change its spot. They are comfortable being anti-government, but here is the thing. If you are asking the public to donate money to allow the kiskadees to keep watching, what makes you think that the people who give you money only want to read anti-government stories? The PPP got 242,498 votes last year. Don’t these voters deserve to read something good about the 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.
