Dear Editor,
In my role as an ‘Apostle to the Gentiles’, I am involved in issues that trouble the “least among us”. I work with ex-offenders, recovering addicts, and the street people; and if there is one thing I find severely lacking in Guyana, it is the availability of mentors.
If our chronic and precipitous brain drain has done anything, it has robbed Guyana of a pool of role models and mentors, increasingly among men and boys. Therefore, whenever an occasion arises, and purely by evolutionary default, those in need of guidance look to their leaders. They look to pastors, priests, imams, doctors, lawyers and, yes, politicians.
Every year (in Guyana alone), some 400,000 citizens show up at the polls to vote for the same politicians. And whenever those politicians show up at schools, churches, and other private and public places, it is observed that they receive the finest and most cordial of treatment. So, in the recesses of the minds of those seeking for role models, there must be some exemplary qualities resident in the political fraternity.
I respected Mr Burnham. I liked to listen to him speak. I admired how he behaved as if the wealth of Guyana belonged to Guyanese. But I never liked him. I lived on Laing Avenue, and I could remember as a little boy how on Sundays he would ride his big white horse as his helpers handed out cassava sticks, pigeon peas seeds, cutlasses, forks and the like. Those used to be grand occasions for us little ghetto children.
However, one of the reasons I never liked him was because of how I saw him treat women. He was loose in his interactions with them. In my little mind, he behaved disrespectfully.
And after all these years, I am unable to shake that negative image of him. Of course there are other things that I encountered with him that have also helped to shape a less than favourable image of him in my mind.
I loved President Desmond Hoyte. I was fortunate to work a brief stint for him during the 1997 campaign. I was stationed at the Congress Place at Sophia, and worked in the public relations department. Mr Hoyte conducted himself professionally at all times. And after all these years, I am unable to shake that positive image of him.
And that brings me back to the fray of the saga between Justice Franklin Holder and Attorney General Basil Williams. Many children at the primary and high school levels are listening and looking at how this story has descended into a blame game between two grown public figures. Parents and teachers are talking about it and taking sides. Relatives and friends are defining the battle lines, and the children are watching and listening.
Mr Williams continues to say that he did nothing wrong nor unusual in that courtroom. The Judge is maintaining that he (the Judge) was disrespected. However, the Judge did not do what most Judges do when they feel disrespected in their courtrooms. He refused, and still continues to refuse, to hold the AG in contempt of court.
Therefore, the least the goodly Attorney General could have done, as an overture, was to apologise. Such an apology would have been used by teachers and parents, family and friends to show that civility exists, even at the highest levels of our judicial and governmental systems.
The AG would have moved up a notch in the estimation of some of his detractors. The Judge would have accepted the apology, and might have even had occasion to favour him.
Now the moment has been lost. The AG has stonewalled and refused to apologise. The Judge has recused himself. A wonderful opportunity to be magnanimous has slipped by. A ‘teaching moment’ on public display has been lost; and a rare opportunity to be some young child’s role model has been squandered.
Maybe some public figures do not understand the weight of their office; not only professionally but socially. So let’s hope that the new Judge does not come to this case haunted by the memories of some void of a role model. Let’s also hope that the new judge is not perturbed by the realities of this case. For if either of those possibilities informs the emotions of the new Justice, the AG might well find that he would have lost corn and husk.
Sincerely,
Pastor W P Jeffrey
Practical Christianity Ministries
