Veteran regional journalist, the late Rickey Singh
Guyanese-born veteran Caribbean journalist, Rickey Singh, passed away at the age of 88 on Saturday.
“Singh transitioned at his home in Barbados on Saturday,” Guyana Press Association (GPA) indicated via a statement in which it extended condolences to the family, friends and regional media colleagues of the journalist and columnist.
Singh published his first story in 1957 at the Guiana Graphic, now Guyana Chronicle. He swiftly moved from covering general stories and beats to political reporting, covering various issues in Guyana and the Caribbean. He was also a columnist who wrote on politics and social issues in the region.
According to the GPA, Singh contributed to several wire services and publications in the region, including Guyana, Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, the BBC Caribbean Report and Caribbean News Agency (CANA) as well as services in North America and Britain.
Singh was a recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the West Indies (UWI) for his contributions as a journalist in regional affairs. He was also a founder and first President of the now defunct Caribbean Association of Media Workers (CAMWORK).
On Saturday, the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM) also joined in mourning the loss of “…a political journalist who, in the words of veteran Trinidadian journalist Tony Fraser, was “was born in Guyana but belonged to the Caribbean”.
In 2023, Singh who migrated in 1975 over press freedom issues, was recognised with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Guyana.
Another veteran regional journalist, Earl Bousquet, in a March 2023 column, described Singh as “fearless.” He said Singh’s professional life was “…dotted with colourful stories…” and “hair-raising exchanges” with larger-than-life political figures both at home and across the Caribbean.
According to Bousquet, Singh was the “most-harassed and politically-punished Caribbean journalist.”
Despite living in Barbados, Singh had been writing columns for the state-owned Guyana Chronicle since 1992 but eventually pulled the Sunday feature in September 2015 under A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC). This was after one of his columns, which was critical of the David Granger-led Administration and then Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo, was not published. In severing relations with the newspaper, where he started his journalism career, the columnist had expressed that the Chronicle “…seems to have fallen victim to a most negative policy of the interferences by the new APNU/AFC coalition Administration.”
“As a journalist of the Caribbean region for a pretty long period of years, I am aware of charges of partisan political interferences by Governments in various states of our Caribbean Community, Guyana being among them—previously and currently. But the haste to do so by the current Prime Minister of Guyana [Nagamootoo] and the raw, arrogant tactics being pursued by him to ensure crippling [of] the Chronicle’s independence, is most disgusting and shocking”, Singh had stated in a letter to the newspaper back in 2015.
