Anything goes when you want to grab power!

Malcolm Harripaul has sallied forth once again to repay Brigadier Granger for the loan the latter one secured for him – while breaking all the rules of the GDF’s Credit Union. We wonder what has been promised if APNU/AFC gets its hands on the national till. Harripaul claims that AG Nandlall is ‘racist’ because he referred to the brigadier as a “soldier”. Gasp! He wasn’t a soldier? And here we thought we were the only one that thought Granger was more ideologue than soldier under Burnham and Hoyte!

According to Harripaul, Nandlall “betrayed his mindset as regards soldiers and given the fact that 90 per cent of our soldiers are Afro-Guyanese his utterance may be construed as racist”. So from that premise we can then safely conclude that Harripaul’s bosom buddy Kissoon is an incorrigible racist. Just today, Kissoon wrote: “Have you ever witnessed the police catching a thief in the act? Growing up in South Georgetown, I have seen those incidents literally countless times.” South Georgetown, after all, is 99 per cent Afro-Guyanese.
Isn’t Kissoon stereotyping the Afro-Guyanese of South Georgetown? Are they all thieves? But we know better, don’t we? Kissoon is a man who announced that he was even ashamed of being East Indian and of how racially mixed his family is. Kissoon may be guilty of self hate, but he certainly is no racist. We, therefore, have to look at the context of his remarks. And the same for Nandlall’s.
Nandlall was making the point that by appointing himself to head the parliamentary Constitutional Reform Committee, Granger was breaking another parliamentary tradition: as a soldier he would be the first non-lawyer to head such a committee in the history of the Commonwealth. It has nothing to do with viewing a soldier “as just a man running around with a gun and incapable of anything else”. It has to do with why everyone else has seen fit to believe that a legal background is de rigueur for heading a Constitutional Reform Committee.
But then, when Granger was commandant of the GDF, he had no problem with Burnham traipsing around in a general’s outfit and taking oaths of allegiance from the officer corps including – right up front – Granger. Anything goes when you want to grab power!