AT the beginning of the 21st century in Guyana, Kaieteur News was still maintaining a healthy lead over Stabroek News (SN). There were national occurrences that kept both papers in demand. These included the birth of the AFC; the PNC’s electoral loss in 2005; Donald Ramotar’s minority government; the APNU-AFC 2015 election victory, and the five months of election rigging.
The year 2020 marked a deadly decline in the journalistic integrity of SN, and from there on, SN slid so deeply into anti-governmental journalism that the best description was an atavistic reversion to the anti-Jaganism of the newspapers owned by the Mulatto/Creole class (MCC) in the 1960s – Argosy, Chronicle, and Evening News. In many ways, SN from 2020 onwards looked identical to those papers.
Why this insane descent into irrational anti-PPPism? I will repeat once more that no society will grasp the meaning of its past and present sociology and political economy if its intellectuals do not offer the society a class analysis of social phenomena. To understand the depth that SN went to denigrate the PPP government from 2020 onwards, one has to understand the class relationship SN as an MCC entity had with both the PNC and the AFC when they came to power in 2015.
David DeCaires and David Granger shared a close middle-class friendship long before Granger dreamt of becoming a politician. DeCaires knew the Granger family well, and one of Mr. Granger’s daughters became a senior journalist at SN. When Mr. Granger’s monthly magazine, Guyana Review, could no longer sustain itself, Mr. DeCaires bought the copyright and printed it in SN as a quarterly supplement.
Co-founder Miles Fitzpatrick’s second closest friend after DeCaires himself, Hugh Chomondeley, was the father of senior government minister and AFC bigwig Cathy Hughes. Mr. Chomondeley was a life-long buddy of Mr. Fitzpatrick. Both DeCaires and Fitzpatrick were close friends of Drs. Clive Thomas and Rupert Roopnaraine. Mr. Fitzpatrick and his wife were very close with Dr. Thomas’s first wife, Alice.
Just look at the graphic facts. SN had long-standing connections with the President of Guyana, Mr. Granger and three senior figures in government – Mrs. Hughes, Thomas and Roopnaraine. Mr. Timothy Jonas, a partner in the law firm of DeCaires and Fitzpatrick, was a foundation member of the AFC. The overlapping class relationships here were obvious to any political observer. What happened in 2015 was that the entitlement desire of the MCC in the 1950s had come alive in the 2015 elections.
The MCC became mentally jaded when Forbes Burnham took the strategic support the MCC gave him in the 1960s only to ditch the MCC after 1970. The quarrel between the MCC and Burnham was over the MCC’s obsession with entitlement. They had to be the successor to the colonial state. For some interesting notes on the fallout between the MCC and Burnham, see the book, By Tyrone Ferguson, “Management of Guyana’s Political Economy, 1965- 1985.”
The remnants of the MCC were still influential in Guyana. First they tried their hand with the WPA in the 1970s, then with the AFC. Eventually the MCC came to power in 2015. The loss of power in 2020 was a laceration of the psyche of both the MCC and SN. The PPP had come back in power, and that was completely unacceptable for the MCC. From August 2020, SN decided that it would not accept the non-Christian Indians in power in Guyana once more.
The first attempt to derail the Ali presidency occurred in September 2020 when SN and the Guyana Human Rights Association tried to whip up racial frenzy by accepting the PNC’s theory that Indians in Cotton Tree went wild in celebrating the PPP’s victory, became over-zealous, and committed the racially inspired murder of two cousins. In fact, the boys were killed in a drug deal gone sour.
Brendon DeCaires and his sister, Isabelle, took over the newspaper in 2020 and, together with anti-PPP hater, editor, Anand Persaud, shaped the SN into a propaganda theatre against the Ali presidency. This was the vendetta of the MCC against Indian leadership of the government living through the pages of SN.
Isabelle DeCaires was insanely hostile to the PPP. She criticised on one occasion the clothes the president wore. She described Guyana as a flawed democracy, and she co-authored a letter to President Ali demanding that Guyana get out of oil production. Ms. DeCaires was dedicated to preserving the MCC in Guyana. She converted the house of her father, named Moray House. It held a monthly social gathering for MCC personalities and a monthly anti-government symposium. I hope SN remains alive but without the control of the DeCaires children and Mr. Anand Persaud. I sincerely hope the paper survives.
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.