Latest update March 29th, 2024 12:59 AM
Apr 17, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
I am not a choir boy for the Kaieteur News and will never be choir boy for any organization. If anyone out there knows any of the seniors in the Editorial Management of Kaieteur News at the personal level, KN Management will tell you that as someone who has been with KN from the start, I have never failed to advance my views, beliefs and principles in confrontations; I have had in the twenty-three years of Kaieteur News’s existence.
The dropping of my columns in 2010, after a disagreement with its publisher, Mr. Lall was widely covered in this country and beyond. Tomorrow, I could lose my column but that doesn’t mean we should not reply to the fools like GHK Lall.
My defence of the Kaieteur News against the tirade of some “Johnny Come Lately”, by the name of GHK Lall is not essentially a defence of the newspaper (that is the task of its publisher and editor) but of the historical record of Guyana which Lall is ignorant off because he barely qualifies as a Guyanese having lived all his life outside.
I have a healthy respect for the Stabroek News. I once wrote that Guyana would be a more troubled place if the Stabroek News goes out of existence. I hope we never see that.
But to deny the role of the Kaieteur News in the shaping of the human rights and democratic landscape of this country is to be morally offensive. In the history of the media in this country, the Kaieteur News stands out as the media house that has chalked up a formidable record of scoops as the publication which has deeply impacted on this country.
Someone needs to tell GHK Lall that the Kaieteur News reached where it is today not by one person only. It was always the contributions of many, a team. I want to be unambiguous – there are genuine criticisms against the Kaieteur News. I have mine. I have always voiced them. I would think that there are plausible weaknesses of the Stabroek News too.
I don’t know GHK Lall; I don’t care to know him. From what he writes, it is clear this gentleman is a show-off and one of the castigations of the Stabroek News is how it could allow such eccentric, senseless, meaningless letters from him, most of which is a crusade to prove to Guyanese that he can write prose but you do not understand a damn thing of what he is saying. I remember once, Dr. Alissa Trotz wrote a letter complaining that the content of a missive by Charles Ramson Snr was an exercise in sesquipedalian bravado.
I read Ramson’s letter and all it did was to prove the writer knows big words. How did Dr. Trotz missed the senseless bravados in those letters by GHK Lall?
There are things about Lall that the public needs to know. One is that, this very man had complained to both Lall and Adam Harris that he wasn’t getting his letters published in a newspaper.
I remember both Lall and Harris talking about that. If he feels this way about Kaieteur News, why send letters to it? Secondly, he is a personal friend of the Editor of Stabroek News (saw them having lunch together at German’s a few years back). But should that lead you to constantly criticize a sister newspaper? I am a friend of the Chairman of the Chronicle and she knows I think the Chronicle is a not a professionally run outfit.
Lall out of nowhere acquired the chairmanship of the Gold Board, an important state function for which so many Guyanese are qualified to hold because of more relevant qualifications than Lall and they have served Guyana far, far longer than Lall.
How did Lall get to be Chairman of the Gold Board? Does he have certain kinds of political connection? And does this connection explain the insults against the Kaieteur News? Is someone pulling the chain of this expatriate Guyanese?
I will avoid further criticism of Lall because I don’t want a law suit but I will close with one particular grievance that I have against the leadership of this country. It is an anger that I have expressed unapologetically in these columns. Positions should go to Guyanese who stayed and weather the storms since the late seventies.
I read where the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Guyana, Dr. Ivelaw Griffith, described for the Stabroek News all the things he learnt from the thirty-six years that he lived outside. At least Griffith doesn’t condemn others. Lall lived for more that forty years outside and engages in “eye-pass.”
THIS IDIOT TELLING GUYANA WE HAVE NO SAY IN THE 50% PROFIT SHARING AGREEMENT WE HAVE WITH EXXON.
Mar 29, 2024
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