Opposition media complaints
Kaieteur News – We are ashamed in this announcement again of opposition leaders, this time in the wake of the pitiful outreach and appeal to the US Ambassador to Guyana, Ms Sarah-Ann Lynch, to record their despair over how the Guyanese media apparently manipulated the political group and its leaders in carrying its messages.
We put this front and center before the coalition’s best people: what messages? We have ensured that, on most, if not all occasions, we carry news articles about developments in relation to the group’s election petitions to Guyana’s highest courts (although we have our own views on the constitutional validity of those petitions). We have not allowed one passing of any high profile public servant, possibly a supporter of the old coalition government, to pass us by, nor the attention of the reader of this paper. We have covered those stories, and we have carried editors that included shape or form commentary on such unacceptable and unhelpful situations. Our commentaries have been untrue and incompatible with the current PPP / C government, in relation to such firings, no matter how subtle and skilful they were implemented. We offer the example of that zealous Guyanese oil expert, Dr. Vincent Adams – himself a coalition activist – and his forced and invisible departure from the Guyana Environmental Protection Agency, and how it was so clumsily organized by top PPP leaders.
The coalition leaders are going before the US Ambassador and rendering this picture of inaccuracy mystical and insulting. We will not be so arrogant and seize for ourselves the right to speak on behalf of the rest of the media, but we are gravely offended at how the coalition leadership has portrayed parts of the local media to the Ambassador.
This is the opposite of what we have been talking about, and we are on record that we are opening our doors in one attempt after another, and for months now, to engage and encourage internal spokespeople to the coalition hierarchy (as chosen by the party) to come into our studios, to come before our audience and share their side of the story, and to be prepared to ask probing and honest questions. There have been no participants from the coalition side, other than casual engagement. We are here to do our bit, and the coalition must also do its bit, by putting their best foot forward; he must stop looking back.
The coalition must come soon to realize that the devastating and desperate election break, from the one best forgotten last year, is over and now in history. The governance of a country is involved. And just in case the top coalition leaders might have forgotten, it’s this country, this Guyana from our country, we’re talking about, at stake. This country is not cleanly governed, but skilled and secretive. This is where the coalition would be worth more than its weight in gold. But he has to pull his weight, and by all means, the coalition is struggling. His leadership must remember that it is an essential part of Guyana’s existing mechanism for the practice of democratic governance.
In particular, it must be a muscular and unstoppable presence with what is happening with the nation’s oil wealth. That wealth is not properly handled by any reasonable standard, and yet the opposition is content to be largely disconnected, mostly shady.
The coalition should be pressing without dropping, but now it is blaming, rather lamely, the press for its own failings, its own weaknesses, its own disappointing record that leaves us wondering if it can be call it an honest opposition. That is, one principled, one arrogant, and one that causes a runaway and fraudulent government to pause and rethink its tracks.
We would like to see the coalition take a firm stance on some key issues because the nation’s current well-being and prospects in future and future generations are involved and at great risk. Those predictions, which our forefathers have been waiting for so long here; and the way the new government has dealt with them leaves so much to be desired, so much that is condemnable. It can’t be the best the coalition can think of because the local media blocks its messages and, therefore, has to turn to reaching out to the American Ambassador for help getting those messages out in front of the widest possible audience. Again, the coalition has found a way to bypass its important responsibilities, by passing the ball to others for them to carry.