THE MISCHIEF OF MISQUOTATION: Dr. Persaud’s Distorted War on a Columnist

THE MISCHIEF OF MISQUOTATION

Dr. Persaud’s Distorted War on a Columnist

 OPINION BY :Hem Kumar —September,2026

Dr. Randy Persaud, a man who sits on the Defence Board of Guyana as a Director, advises the President, and holds the office of Pro- Chancellor at the University of Guyana, published a column on Saturday accusing fellow columnist GHK Lall of inciting armed insurgency against the Guyanese state.

It is a serious charge. It is also, on the plain evidence of Mr. Lall’s own words, false.

Read Mr. Lall’s actual column. Its subject is the state of siege around Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed: his phone seized by police, his party’s Facebook page erased, named officers — the Police Commissioner, the head of a Noise Nuisance Taskforce, a senior superintendent — tracking his movements. Mr. Lall’s advice to Mr. Mohamed is that he adapt to this reality: move carefully, disperse his assets, stop presenting himself as an easy target. And Mr. Lall’s actual prescribed endpoint, stated in his own closing lines, is not war. It is surrender. He advises Mr. Mohamed to “give the Yanks what they want,” to negotiate like “a Noriega, Pinochet, or the Shah” — public figures remembered not for insurgency but for capitulation, plea, and exile. “He pleas, he bargains,” Mr. Lall writes; that is what frees a man, in his telling, not what arms him.

Dr. Persaud quotes one sentence from this column accurately: Mr. Lall’s line about being a “stealth operator” who must “live off the land.” That quotation is correctly attributed. What follows it is not analysis of what Mr. Lall wrote — it is Dr. Persaud’s own five-point invention of what a guerrilla campaign would require:civilians used as human shields, the killing of “popular civilian personalities” to blame on the state, a comparison to Osama bin Laden.

None of that appears anywhere in Mr. Lall’s column. Dr. Persaud built it himself, attached it to a single borrowed metaphor, and then declared that Mr. Lall had “intimated” the whole doctrine — that this “implies the use of violent methods to bring down a government or even the state.”

That is not rebuttal. It is the construction of an argument the other man did not make, followed by the prosecution of the argument you constructed. A columnist who is not defending the position attributed to him has, by definition, been misrepresented.

The pattern matters because of who is doing it and how. Dr. Persaud does not engage the substance underneath Mr. Lall’s column at all — the seized phone, the deleted Facebook page, the named surveillance of a sitting Leader of the Opposition. He steps around all of it to build a national-security accusation against a columnist instead. He closes by picturing Mr. Lall “polishing the Lamborghini” while sending others to die — an insinuation of terrorism dressed as literary flourish, aimed at a man whose column, again, counsels capitulation rather than combat.

Along the way, Dr. Persaud offers, without a single figure, that the Ali government has produced “dramatic improvements in the lives of everyday working people… across all ethnic groups in all regions” — inserted as the motive theory for why anyone would want “terrorism” in Guyana.

An unsourced claim of universal economic triumph, deployed as evidence in an accusation of incitement, does not strengthen the accusation. It only underlines that the column is advocacy wearing the costume of security analysis.

 Dr. Persaud is entitled to find Mr. Lall’s rhetoric distasteful, cynical, or irresponsible — there is a fair case to be made that “guerrilla fighter” is a reckless choice of image for any columnist to reach for, regardless of what he meant by it. That case could have been made honestly, on the words actually written.

Instead, a man who holds public office and sits on the country’s Defence Board chose to manufacture an insurgent doctrine, attribute it to a columnist who proposed nothing of the kind, and publish the accusation under his own name and title.

 Public office carries the discipline of accuracy, particularly when the charge is one as grave as inciting political violence. Misrepresenting a columnist’s published words to manufacture that charge is not robust debate.

It is precisely the kind of conduct that erodes the credibility of the office-holder who engages in it — and it does nothing for the public conversation Guyana’s press freedom depends on.

— The Board

SOURCES

GHK Lall, “OPINION: WIN Mohamed must rethink his strategy, refine his tactics,” Demerara Waves, Sept. 5, 2026, 7:39 a.m.

Dr. Randy Persaud, “OPINION: Azruddin the guerrilla: be careful what you wish for,” Demerara Waves, Sept. 5, 2026, 11:43 a.m.