Latest update May 12th, 2024 12:59 AM
Nov 17, 2011 Letters
Dear Editor,
I have been mulling a comment on the SN’s “Diaspora” article of Mr. Arif Bulkan, “The Bharrat Jagdeo Presidency: A dozen years of degeneration and decay”.
Mr. Bulkan, who we are informed teaches “human rights law at UWI”, begins with a call for truth: “What would an honest evaluation of the Jagdeo Presidency reveal?”
But Mr. Bulkan is less than honest in declaring his own interests in proceeding to commit what can only be described as a nasty “hatchet job” on the President. As a lawyer, with a PhD at that, Mr. Bulkan would have been warned about “interested parties”.
Mr. Bulkan is a member of a family that has served the PNC well during the dictatorship and were more than handsomely rewarded. His uncle, Shahabuddeen, was one of the chief architects of the 1980 Burnhamite Constitution that confirmed the Kabaka’s existential dictatorial powers. His personal reward, of course, was the nomination to the World Court at the Hague.
Mr. Bulkan’s other relatives are the Mazaharallys. Closer to Mr. Bulkan’s home, his brothers were able to procure various properties and concessions from which they attempted to engage in upstream forestry products. Mr. Bulkan might care to inform us who now has the old, failed PNC glass factory.
Most recently, not long before Mr. Bulkan’s venom-laced intervention, it was reported in the press that one of the companies of his brothers went to the President to request a $300M loan to bail them out.
And I believe that we arrive at the heart of Mr. Bulkan’s angst that triggered his attack on the President. The President refused – most likely because he knew that if in a market where the price of wooden furniture has risen by several factors and that the present management team couldn’t make it, would be a case of throwing good money after bad. And this was taxpayers’ money.
Mr. Bulkan’s anger has even blinded him to the operations of the constitution. He claims that “Jagdeo’s succession was contrived through a circuitous route”. But was it unconstitutional? And would the legal scholar Mr. Bulkan advice the then President Janet Jagan to circumvent the agreement between the PPP and the Civic that the Guyanese people had approved at the ballots? Mr. Bulkan, you are molding future human rights lawyers of the Caribbean. Remember the operative word you are practising is “rights” and not “wrongs”.
Dave Martindale
Listen how to run an oil country
May 12, 2024
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