`Like every journalist who chooses principle over convenience, he had to make the choice of remaining true to his integrity rather than taking the safe road home. But faith and hope were deeper than fear’
Had renowned Guyanese journalist Rickey Singh lived to receive the honour of induction into the Caribbean Broadcasting Union’s (CBU) Hall of Fame, he would have understood that it represented decades of sacrifice in the service of one of democracy’s essential pillars—the right to seek the truth, tell the truth and hold power to account—his daughter, Donna Ramsammy, has said.
Ramsammy received Singh’s instruments of induction at the opening ceremony of the CBU’s 57th Annual General Assembly, held at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre on August 18, where she delivered an acceptance speech.
Singh and the late Jamaican Professor Aggrey Brown, a former director of the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC), were inducted into the CBU Hall of Fame this year.
Ramsammy said her father’s presence would have reminded those gathered that “speaking truth to power requires deep courage—the courage to confront the fear of loss: loss of work, loss of friendships and safety in your own homeland, Guyana.”
At the time of his death on July 5, 2025, Singh lived in Barbados, his adopted homeland. After leaving Guyana, his work permits were revoked first in Trinidad and Tobago and later in Barbados.
With his family living in Barbados, Singh’s work permit there was revoked in 1983 following his coverage of the United States invasion of Grenada, and he was permitted only periodic visits to see them. The decision was reversed in 1986.
“My father knew these costs. His whispered concerns, captured in telephone wiretaps across borders, were not the imaginings of a man unaware of the consequences of his choices,” Ramsammy said.
His decisions, she added, had to be weighed against their impact on his wife and six children, since there was no safe road home.
“Like every journalist who chooses principle over convenience, he had to make the choice of remaining true to his integrity rather than taking the safe road home. But faith and hope were deeper than fear,” she said.
Singh hoped that by speaking the truth, good people would find the courage to stand up and demand better from their leaders and institutions, and that his example would encourage other media practitioners to choose truth, principle and courage.
Ramsammy, herself a media practitioner, said journalism was under extraordinary pressure from misinformation, artificial intelligence, the withholding of advertising revenue and the temptation to make the profession more comfortable for the few who hold power instead of more useful to the majority who need the truth.
“We cannot allow that to happen. We must let hope drive us, not fear. If you surrender your voice, you surrender more than a media industry. You surrender part of our freedom,” she said.
Having fought for independence and self-direction, she said, Singh hoped Caribbean people would never again surrender their freedoms or squander the inheritance owed to their children.
Thanking the CBU for honouring the principles for which her father sacrificed, Ramsammy said: “It was his conviction that truth is always worth defending.”
Guardian of truth
In a profile presented at the CBU conference on August 19, veteran Caribbean journalist Wesley Gibbings described Singh as not only a journalist, but also a regionalist, teacher, mentor, builder of institutions, defender of press freedom and guardian of truth.
“For more than six decades, the people of the Caribbean entrusted Rickey Singh with their stories,” he said.
Truth may be delayed, obstructed or denied, Gibbings said, but if people are willing to protect it, it will continue to find a way forward.
He said the induction represented a memory constructed through the first and second drafts of history, public service through the journalistic creed to seek and speak the truth, and the responsibility of those who use words to help people understand themselves.
Born on February 1, 1937, Singh was raised at Canal Number Two Polder, West Bank Demerara. He lost his father, Pharsadie, when he was two months old and his mother, Dudhia, popularly known as “Jessie”, when he was about nine.
His mother represented women whose work and dignity were undervalued and, for more than six decades, Gibbings said, Singh continued the conversation she had begun through his journalism, activism and personal relationships—from the cane fields to newspaper offices, government buildings and CARICOM summits, and from the Caribbean to the wider world.
While heads of state, heads of government and diplomats heard and understood Singh’s message and either referenced or ignored him, Gibbings said Caribbean citizens depended on him to tell them honestly what was happening in the world around them.
“Journalists listened to him, and some wanted to be just like him,” he said.
Apart from observing and reporting, Gibbings said, Singh wanted his work to change how people understood their environment and their responsibilities to one another.
Singh knew that an election in Guyana could alter political thinking in Barbados.
“He knew that a constitutional crisis in Jamaica mattered in Port of Spain. He understood that the pain of Grenada, the uncertainty of Suriname, the aspirations of Belize and the trials of Haiti were not foreign matters. They were part of the same Caribbean story,” Gibbings said.
Singh’s understanding of the issues shaped the quality of his journalism.
“Some reported what had happened; Rickey asked what it meant. Others described the crisis of the day; Rickey searched for its causes and consequences. Others pursued the headline and the deadline, but Rickey followed its impact on human history,” Gibbings said.
‘Our Caribbean’
Singh began his journalistic career at the Guyana Chronicle and later worked at the defunct Guiana Graphic, where the newsroom “became for him a classroom, a family and a platform from which to serve the public.”
He understood from an early age that the Caribbean Sea united rather than divided the region, an outlook expressed in his newspaper column, Our Caribbean.
“The farmer in St Elizabeth, the fisherman in Gouyave, the teacher in Castries, the hunters of the Rupununi savannahs, the steelpan arranger in Port of Spain—all belong to the same larger story. Rickey Singh invited us to see the region not as a collection of fragments, but as a community with shared responsibilities,” Gibbings said.
Singh also regarded human rights as universal. As a founding member of the Caribbean Human Rights Network, he championed issues which Gibbings said continued to slide “almost silently” and were no longer treated as an important part of the region’s development agenda.
The Rickey Singh Initiative for Excellence in Journalism, recently launched by the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, establishes important links between journalism, human-rights advocacy and Singh’s belief in a hemispheric space in which the Caribbean does not exist at the margins, Gibbings said.
The Caribbean Contact newspaper, which Singh produced for the Caribbean Conference of Churches during the 1970s and 1980s, also helped to create a regional meeting place for ideas despite its limited resources.
A project is now underway to digitise and preserve every edition in Singh’s personal collection of Caribbean Contact and make them available to the public.
“In my view, this would constitute an enduring tribute not only to a late, great Caribbean editor, but to an effort to ingrain independent journalism as part of our region’s institutional landscape,” Gibbings said.
From the newspaper’s offices, Singh helped shape regional conversations about politics, faith, social justice, democracy and Caribbean identity, while helping people find their voices.
He also encouraged numerous young writers and journalists.
“He saw potential before others saw achievement. I was part of one such cohort in the early 1980s because he understood that editing was not only about correcting grammar and structure, but also cultivating confidence and context rooted in unique Caribbean realities,” Gibbings said.
“He did not merely publish stories; he nurtured storytellers. That is a profound part of his legacy—that he helped construct a community of Caribbean journalists, one that needed to be protected and cherished.”
At the Caribbean News Agency, Singh partnered with and mentored many of today’s media leaders and accomplished practitioners while helping to build institutional structures.
As founding president of the then Caribbean Association of Media Workers, Gibbings said, Singh gave practical meaning to regional solidarity among media professionals and to freedom of the press.
He understood that defending press freedom required collective action which transcended territorial boundaries and that “a mouth is always muzzled by the food it eats” through fear, dependence and even reward.
Despite exile, uncertainty and official displeasure, Gibbings said, Singh responded with persistence and a refusal to surrender to self-censorship.
Singh wrote about the overthrow of Eric Gairy in Grenada, the murder of Maurice Bishop and the violence which followed in 1983, as well as the assassination of Guyanese historian and political activist Dr Walter Rodney.
“He refused to allow difficult questions to be buried beneath official explanations,” Gibbings said.
Singh also covered the attempted coup in Trinidad and Tobago in 1990, with constitutional democracy serving as a central theme of his reporting.
“Rickey earned our respect not through acts of arrogance, but through experience and integrity,” Gibbings said.
Were Singh present at the CBU assembly, Gibbings said, he would not have concentrated on the impact of technology but on the examination and verification of facts.
“Rickey would have said that while technology changes, ethics do not, and the obligation to verify remains.”
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