Fact check Frederick Kissoon, Vincent Alexander and Forbes Burnham
Kaieteur News – I wanted to ignore Vincent Alexander’s last letter on me in KN (January 4) because I told myself who in this country would believe Alexander after five months of election rigging where Alexander was one of the personalities most prominently uttering words and shaping his behavior in support of electoral interference.
I’ve changed my mind. I am now responding to Alexander through an open challenge. Once he answers my questions here factually, I will resign as a columnist from this newspaper, and consolidate my disappearance by asking Kaieteur News management not to entertain any further correspondence from me in the future. Alexander wants KN to check my columns in facts and go as far as asking editors to check facts as a policy. No doubt that would apply to the alternative facts that Alexander publishes in all four daily papers quite often.
Here are a host of questions, which Alexander must really answer when juxtaposed with the facts and realities in contemporary Guyanese history and the current impulses in Guyanese society.
1-Do you agree that Prime Minister Forbes Burnham had no legal authority to deny Walter Rodney a teaching post for AS because he, Burnham, was not legally elected in the 1973 general election to be prime minister?
2-Between the years of two general elections – 1973 and 1980 – you held the post of leader of the PNC youth branch, YSM, do you accept the fact that Forbes Burnham rigged both elections?
3-Do you agree with Burnham’s becoming dictator at his party’s Sophia congress in 1974; announced that his party was now the most important organization in Guyana with jurisdiction in addition to all the state institutions?
4-Given all that President Burnham has done for Guyana, do you not accept the fact that the Guyanese people see you in a frank manner by being chairman of the Burnham Foundation?
5-Isn’t it a fact that Burnham was involved in the murder of Walter Rodney and dealt with the murder of Education Minister Vincent Teekah?
6-On March 4, District Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo was using fake numbers that did not match voting statements (SOPs) in the possession of the APNU + AFC party, nine other opposition parties and the international observers. Yes or no?
7-On Friday, March 6, the Chief Election Officer (CEO) wrote GECOM to convene a meeting for a statement (only suspended by injunction). You were obliged to stop that meeting because the statement was unlawful. You did not join the other three PPP commissioners in opposing what the CEO did. Yes or no?
8-On Friday March 13, Mingo ignored the Chief Justice’s ruling and repeated his mumbo jumper at GECOM’s head office in Kingston. It’s not factual that Mingo continued his rigging?
9-You submitted a proposal to GECOM to accept the statement as it was by the March 13 tabulation. Was that not your acceptance of rigging as you saw and knew from your days at the YSM.
10-As GECOM Commissioner whose obligation was to conduct transparent and legal elections with legal consequences, you wrote to the five CARICOM Prime Ministers who visited in your capacity as head of the Year of African-American People asking them to understand that well beyond an election and that must be their focus. They correctly ignored you because they viewed your interference as hypocrisy. By asking them to help Guyana you were at the same time, as commissioner of GECOM, helping to destroy Guyana. Right or wrong?
11-In a letter to me dated November 1, 2020 (KN) you wrote that the National Service was not mandatory. It’s another example of my iniquities. It was compulsory for AS students, student nurses and successful scholarship holders. I accuse you of being an unlimited, excessive, compelling liar.
12-In that same November 1 letter you stated that you were a student in Moscow in 1973 so you could not have held the position of chairman of the YSM. In your letter to me dated January 4, you informed readers between 1979 and 1985 that you were in Moscow as a student. How many years were you then a student? You must be Russia’s most permanent student – 13 years. So when were you head of the YSM with the guy we named “Bowtie Jesus” as your deputy? “Bowtie Jesus” was President Granger’s personal friend who set out at AS.
13- Did you see the APNU + AFC SOPs? They lost the 2020 election.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)