Dr. Mc Doom’s pair of red underwear has lost its brightness and shape

Jul 22, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Professor Omar Shahabudin McDoom, of Guyanese extraction, who teaches at the London School of Economics, tells us in his online profile that his scholarly interests are in ethnic conflicts and ethnic integrations with specialized areas of Asia and Africa.
There is nothing in his outline of his scholarly works that take in Guyana. Dr. Mc Doom recently did a two-part series in the Stabroek News in the section titled, “In the Diaspora” with the sesquipedalian title; “A sweet tooth, some bad math, and a pair of red underwear: An explanation of persistent ethnic voting and two party dominance in Guyana.”
It appears that the column, “In the diaspora” is becoming haughty, arrogant and condescending. Two weeks ago, Dr. Alisa Trotz and Dr. Arif Bulkan did a joint piece on dominance of party politics and ethnic divisions in which absolutely nothing new was said that we who live in Guyana and study Guyana did not know about. But when you are Guyanese and live outside and you are university educated you get that weird feeling that we, natives who live in the land don’t know anything so you can lecture to us.
Dr. Mc Doom is guilty of the most shameless sin in academia – writing without researching your topic. I will select two areas in which the lack of research is not only shocking and incredible but can damage the credibility of Dr. Mc Doom. I will quote him to avoid charges of misunderstanding. He observed; “The Alliance for Change managed 10.3% of the vote in 2011 with an explicitly multi-ethnic strategy, though it is not clear what portion of the Indian voter it won over.”
Dr. Mc Doom could not be writing on Guyana, maybe another country and he stitched in the name Guyana. How could this gentleman not be familiar with three words that have dominated Guyana since the March 3 Mingo depravity – statements of poll (SOP)? For Dr. Mc Doom’s education, an SOP is a document that records the votes for all the contestants at a polling station. GECOM then publishes the SOPs on its website after every national election.
Available for Dr. Mc Doom to peruse are the SOPs for the 2011 elections. On these documents you can see clearly which party got which ethnic votes. The 10 percent of the national votes the Alliance For Change received came from Indian districts that showed disenchantment with the PPP. This was particular so in Berbice. If Dr. Mc Doom wants to know how Indian, African and the Amerindians voted in March this year, I suggest he look up the PPP’s SOPs which it has posted online.
Here is the most telling part in Dr. Mc Doom’s piece that I was lucky I wasn’t drinking hot coffee when I read it for fear of spilling the hot liquid on my crouch. He writes; “The Working People’s Alliance, while never electorally significant since the loss of its charismatic leader Rodney, stands as a symbol of a desire from below to transition Guyana from ethnic to class politics.”
I would ask readers to bear in mind, the use of the present tense, “stands.” I know the editor of the “In the Diaspora” page. Alissa Trotz is a WPA overseas executive member so I don’t know if she inserted those lines or if they belong to Dr. Mc Doom. I wish he would tell readers.
In which century is Dr. Mc Doom living? And how can he miss a basic research method in this day and age by not consulting the WPA Facebook page. When you go on it, it reads like a party of African politics. The current page has more than a dozen pictures of David Hinds spewing racist invectives in his embrace of the rigged March elections by his party, APNU.
There is nothing multi-racial about the WPA since it came to power in 2015. Since the March elections, David Hinds, Tacuma Ogunseye, Clive Thomas, Desmond Trotman, Eusi Kwayana, Tabitha Sarabo, Maurice Odle, among others, have become shameless defenders of the PNC’s deportment over the past four months.
From 2015, whatever elements have been left in the WPA, they have openly embraced the politics of African domination. There is no class analysis anymore in the politics of the remnants of the WPA. When Dr. Mc Doom writes that the WPA; “stands as a symbol of a desire from below to transition Guyana from ethnic to class politics,” I am wondering if he copied that from some old WPA booklet from 1979 and without thinking used it in his article. Dr. Mc Doom, your slip is showing. Can I ask what underwear you wore when you wrote your opaqueness?

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)