THAT Guyana has had its fair share of ethnic problems over the decades, needs no repeating here, in terms of documentation. Those old enough would have lived through those past challenging times, with all of the frighteningly sad details of race hate. Certainly, lessons would have been learnt, with the main one perhaps, being – WE HAVE TO LIVE TOGETHER.
Also, we would have seen via our television screens the barbaric and murderous end result of appeals to ethnicity. Who will forget Rwanda that descended into a murderous orgy of bloody genocide; and the brutal executions at Srebrenica during the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s. Thank God, and thank God again, that such horrors have not been visited upon this land of six peoples.
But as peace loving Guyanese, we have to be worried and be concerned when a certain columnist continuously attempts to appeal to ethnicity in the furtherance of his anti-national agenda. And I refer to that well known, daily journalist of the Kaieteur News column.    
His column, captioned “King Kong’s bridge in the news”, makes very disturbing reading for its unmistakable appeal to race.  In this article in which he contended that there is ethnic bias in the recent re-zoning of vehicular traffic from East Corentyne to West Coast Berbice and from the latter to the former, he alleges that the bus owners, #63, from East Corentyne, mainly from one ethnic group can ferry passengers from their region to any point on the West Coast Berbice without hindrance. But that those from Hopetown, #50 cannot traverse into East Corentyne.
Let me say this: I am not a traffic expert, nor do I pretend to be one, but surely the relevant authorities must have acted to bring some semblance of order to a situation that seemed chaotic. Therefore, if this decision is found to be flawed, surely there are mechanisms to have whatever perceived anomalies rectified. But to conclude that such regulatory measures are ethnic influenced is indeed incitement of a dangerous kind.
First of all, why selectively chose Hopetown,  a black community, on the West Coast Berbice, as an example, when there are other Indian communities in the same area whose bus owners are facing the same constraint and are similarly angry at the threat to their economic livelihood? 
Is he inferring political influence in the zoning re-configuration? So it would seem, for the very tenet of his allegations suggest such.
One of the dangers of understanding issues within a multi-ethnic society is to be tempted always to do so through the lens of race; while the opposite challenge is attempt to examine same on rational grounds. It is a tactic always resorted to by those whose only aim is to fan the flames of ethnic division and insecurity; and I hope that the ERC has taken note of this latest familiar pattern of extremism from this columnist and begins to rein him in accordance with its constitutional mandate.
Guyana is now a stable country, having overcome recent challenges to its existence as a state. Under no circumstances must the print columns nor even the electronic media be allowed to air/publish ethnic incendiaries, since such a dark culture will only unleash frighten hatred and apocalyptic destruction.

Surely, the media code to which these publishers so often refer to, but trample underfoot must be observed. The publishers must be held to full account for allowing such vitriol.