YOU don’t have to go to a journalism school to know what a newspaper editor should do. Apart from erasing libellous, racist, and personalised vulgar abuse, an editor’s job in to ensure that the finished product, whether a reporter’s piece or a columnist submission, contains credibility.

Perhaps here is a perfect example. If a columnist is doing a piece on a poor batsman whose average was terribly low, you cannot in the same commentary write that in many ways he was ahead of some of the great batsmen. If you do not state why he was ahead of some of the great cricketers, then the commentary becomes unsustainable because you are blatantly contradicting yourself.

The role of the editor is to protect the credibility of the newspaper by taking out that line because it did not make sense; and if you retain it then people will question the competence of the editor.

So, last year, the editor of the Stabroek News column, “In The Diaspora” (ITD), Alissa Trotz published a piece by a Guyanese named Romain Khan. Khan was introduced to readers as an Essequiban who settled in Alberta, Canada. Ms Trotz’s words are that, Khan “made Alberta his home.”

Here is what Khan wrote about Guyana in his piece for ITD (Dec., 29, 25): “… in a country where public spaces have yielded to the modern-capitalist imperative of expanding highways and widened streets that promote the tyranny of the automobile and corporate profiteering … malaise of asphalt, concrete and the environmental and social cleaving of communities. “

Is there anything here that makes Khan appear very silly in your eyes? Yes, there is. Khan left a tropical, non-polluted country rich in carbon credits and settled not in Barbados, Grenada, Seychelles, Maldives Islands, or Bermuda, but in the oil capital of Canada where sprawling highways, streets so sprawling that none come close even in an infinitesimal way of resembling even the widest highway in Guyana.

There is no building in Guyana that has eight levels. There are hundreds of structures in Alberta whose levels are more than 80. For every car you find in Guyana, Alberta has 10,000. For every vehicle with 5000 cc you find in Guyana, Alberta has 25,000. Imagine the pollution there.

For every mega-supermarket that displaced green spaces in Guyana, Alberta has 100. For every ounce of corporate profiteering you find in Guyana, you get 1,000 pounds in Alberta. It is simply impossible to compare Guyana with Alberta for destruction of green spaces. Yet Khan has done that, making himself a fool.

Do you want to see the difference between Alberta and Guyana in terms of an ugly landscape? Just touch your smart phone and bring up Alberta. When you do, then it is an inescapable thought of the reader of seeing you as a fool in referring to Guyana as a place where expanding highways encroach on the green spaces and Guyana is suffering from the tyranny of the automobile and there is corporate profiteering. And guess what?  You live in Alberta.

So, what should Alissa Trotz as editor of Khan have done? To spare Khan from looking foolish, she simply should have taken out that section that I quoted above. Trotz lives in Canada. She has travelled throughout Canada, and so she knows the physical horizon of Alberta. She cannot be so incompetent not to know that in small, developing Guyana, there cannot be a comparison between the highway systems and automobile numbers in Alberta and Guyana.

Khan was going off in the deep end when he went in that direction and Trotz as his editor should have known better, but does she? To compare the encroachment of green spaces by large highways and the number of automobiles in Guyana and Canada is simply beyond one’s imagination.

Finally, Khan also touched on something that really lacerates my psyche. And truly I find it overbearing and as I get older, I am finding it a mental burden that I don’t need in my old age. It has been all over the newspapers in Guyana the past 15 years. It is about people telling us how to fight imperialism, how to stop climate damage, how to shape good governance and they have lived all their lives in countries that are imperialist, have damaged the climate beyond recognition and are far less democratic than Guyana and her CARICOM partners.

Khan found it useful to quote the brilliant Caribbean poet, Edward Kamau Braithwaite regarding the imperialist penetration of the psychology of the colonial subject. But one of the victims of such saturation is Romain Khan himself. If Braithwaite was alive, he would have asked Khan why he left beautiful Essequibo for Alberta. Now realistically, Khan may have left for economic betterment. Fine! One can understand that. But shut your mouth and do not write nonsense.

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.