propaganda press! state sponsored, people powered.

Dear Editor,I regard Mr. Vishnu Bisram as one of the most barefaced persons with whom I have had an ongoing disagreement. This letter here is the fourth occasion that I have asked Mr. Bisram the following questions: (1) Who comprise the executive membership of his organisation, NACTA, of which he proudly exclaims he is the polling director? (2) How many members are in the executive? (3) What are the telephone numbers, addresses and e-mail contacts of the organisation? (4) Name some of the companies that have commissioned polls from NACTA?
Mr. Bisram is irritatingly barefaced. Each time I put forward these questions, he replies to me but carefully avoids answering these queries, the latest being his Good Friday letter in this newspaper. Each time he responds, he drags a number of fictions into his presentations about things I have written about his polls and NACTA that I have no idea about.
In his Good Friday letter, he tells readers of how some respected academics have berated him for liking my columns. I do not know who in Mr. Bisram’s book who is a respected academic when you take into account how Mr. Bisram conceives of social phenomena. Neither could I be bothered about how these so-called academics think of my intellectual work.
I recall one of Bisram’s friends, Dr. Walter Persaud, working out of Thailand instead of Guyana, which needs him, who replied to a question of mine about the definition of violence. He wrote back to me in the letter columns of both independent dailies to tell me that the definition of violence is very simple — as when a man slaps a woman. Is that the kind of person that Bisram classifies as a respected academic?
Or, maybe, like Annan Boodram who gets his facts on Guyana from anonymous columnists? Boodram has never seen it fit to pen a letter on the impropriety of such pen-name masquerades but, instead, found time and energy to castigate me for my viewpoints.
Bisram knows his world of polls in Guyana has disintegrated. He knows he can no longer go to David DeCaires and say that he has just done another poll. Now that he has been exposed, he knows that there will be questions on NACTA.
The point is — and it should be made known in Guyana — that there is no such organisation by the name of NACTA. Mr. Bisram is indeed the polling director of NACTA, but that is a fiction in his head, and he is entitled to create fictions in his mind. Mr. Bisram thinks that because he has written a few eulogistic comments on me it would distract me from pointing out the fallacies in his polls and the propaganda in his evaluations of the Government of Guyana.
Finally, in yet another missive last week, he has requested that I stop my criticism of David Dabydeen, Dr. Randy Persaud and Rickey Singh. I should point out to Bisram that, unlike him and the three persons that he named, I live with my family in Guyana. My kid has to suffer that humiliation in the 21st Century in her country. Rickey Singh and his family are not coming back to Guyana, but are happy in a country that is 166 square miles, Barbados. Dr. Randy Persaud teaches at one of the best universities in the US, where a mere travel grant would be equivalent to five years’ pay for us at the University of Guyana, given the exchange rate.
Randy Persaud, David Dabydeen and Rickey Singh live in three top class countries in the world. I live in a nation that the international lending agencies have classified as one of the 11 poorest in the global community. I have every right to criticise those three persons who enjoy a fantastic income in democratic countries while we here in Guyana live in a state where civilization recedes.
But more importantly, even if we pull together and try to make Guyana better, there is the Government that is so backward, corrupt and incompetent that Dabydeen, Persaud and Singh would never tolerate such a regime in their own country. I say unapologetically that Dabydeen, Singh and Persaud should shut up if they have nothing politically objective to say about bad governance in my country.

Frederick Kissoon