I told her that it offends the country not Frederick Kissoon
Kaieteur News – Last Sunday, at Massy’s Supermarket in Turkeyen, as my cashier checked me, Dr. Melissa Ifill, Pro Vice-Chancellor AS, was next and said to me, “Mr. Kissoon, it seemed I had offended you. ”I knew she was referring to how many columns I made on her stance in the 2020 national election that I repeat here that I analyzed as dangerous, crazy, and injected with compelling thoughts about race and no embrace of country love.
I condemned Dr. Maybe in those columns because since I was a 16-year-old employee at Michael Forde Bookshop reading philosophy books and never went to high school, I wanted to get an education because I believed then and still make those educated people. are the ones to save the world because educated people know what people without education know so they escape the paths of ignorance.
During the five months of election rigging, for a person second in charge of our country’s only national university, Dr. was prejudiced, unharmed and racially shaped. What happened to me was a shock to me. I knew her well. He took part in two consecutive AS protests when the Ramotar presidency terminated my AS contract, an act which the Ombudsman ruled was illegal. We spent a year in Rodneyite bases outside Parliament where we fought for the rights of some very low income groups of people in Region Three and Region Four.
I knew the pains I felt in what the Jagdeo and Ramotar presidencies did for me, my wife and my daughter. The pain was still there when the election rigging started on March 3. But I wasn’t the issue when the rigging started. Jagdeo and Ramotar weren’t the issue when the rigging started with Clairmont Mingo. At stake was my country where I lived and where I did not move.
The electoral fraud was far, far, far more important to prevent me from denying it than the way I felt treated by the PPP government. I knew the government had put me out of employment. I knew the government had made two attempts on my life. I knew that the government had kept me in Brickdam custody for three nights and a day for a traffic offense only.
I knew from secret police sources that the commissioner, Henry Green, and then the president, Ramotar, had agreed to let me and Benschop spend the Christmas season in lockdown. I knew the real big wigs were part of the attack on me that Minister Kwame McCoy and others arrested and charged. Before he died, former GRA chief Khurshid Sattaur told me with sadness in his eyes, “I didn’t have anything against you, I always liked you but I was ordered to go after you.”
These traumas are covered by the prison walls of my psyche. But when Mingo started to deny my daughter the right to vote, those issues were not those traumas. As I wrote above, my country was at stake. As Dr. If I asked what she did to me, I replied, “What you did to the country is not me, the country, not me.” Those were my exact words.
Let us look at the other side of the coin. On March 3, while addressing the election in the studio at Kaieteur Radio, Leonard Gildarie and I were shown unambiguous information – the PPP had won. I voted for Lenox Shuman because I wanted a minority government so we would have accountable governance or a majority brake rule. It didn’t happen.
What was I to do? I was faced with two options in that studio – to support the denial of the Guyanese right to vote because the PPP who traumatized me had won by supporting election rigging or suppressing permanent power from the PNC and AFC, two unworthy groups of people who would control my country. forever. I chose the direction I went in for the following reasons: my philosophy training instructed me that civilization goes out the window when people’s liberty is taken away; I loved my country and it first came before the PNC and the AFC that I didn’t care about; my education at three universities would have been consigned to the gutter if I had denied Guyanese their right to vote; finally, I knew in my heart that Guyana would not have survived had we returned the rigid election and stability of Burnhamism. Dr. Could have joined me to save Guyana and ignore the race for which she was born. Race will never matter to me.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)