The PPP believes that doing 32 things ineptly is unassailable evidence of success

Dear Editor,

Minister Clement Rohee is a perfect example of the absolutism of power, the arrogance of ignorance, the flagrant lack of comprehension of what the people want and the intellectual wasteland that is the PPP leadership. A country is drowning in crime that keeps on escalating with every passing year and the Minister of Home Affairs has the audacity to document 32 instances in which he and the PPP did some things. He pretentiously calls them “reforms” when nothing has changed for the better and in fact, the past 22 years of PPP/C rule has witnessed the greatest ascendancy of criminality in Guyana’s history. That is some feat considering the improved economic situation since the end of the PNC’s police state.

Considering the deepening and worsening crime situation and a failing and tottering security environment, Mr Rohee’s impulsive rush to deliver his list in typical and predictably reactive fashion has not delivered relief; it documented his and the PPP’s staggering failure and colossal missteps despite spending vast sums of taxpayers’ money on these ‘reforms’. This is not only tomfoolery or incompetence or a waste of taxpayers’ money, but it provides an insight into the failed mentality of the PPP, mirroring the PNC before them. It also confirms the tragedy of the constituencies that support these parties purely for racial reasons, which robs them of demanding accountability and insisting on results and positive output. The voters’ philosophy is that the doing of things by their ethnic parties and leaders, no matter how atrociously, incompetently or corruptly, is all that matters. It is enough to get the ethnic constituency to remain. It is enough for apparatchiks like Mr Rohee to believe they are godsend gifts to the nation.

There is no need for quality, accountability, sound performance, stellar results, excellent output and success in achieving the grand objective of less crime and more public security and safety. In the minds of the PPP inner circle, aided and abetted by the low expectations of their supporters, doing 32 things in an inept fashion is unassailable evidence of success. This is the disease which afflicted PNC supporters when the PNC flattened this country much as the PPP is doing today. This simple-minded approach is why Minister Rohee cannot ever get it and why he felt emboldened to emphasize in 32 ways the magnitude of the PPP/C and his own abysmal failure on crime.

The PPP/C will spend $7,447,032,000 on the police force in 2014 and crime will inevitably increase in 2014. It spent $6,768,904 in 2013 and crime predictably increased. Mr Rohee once gloated and boasted that Guyana spent 1.9% of its GDP on the war on drugs while the US spent 0.9%. Yet, Roger Khan, David Clarke and Peter Morgan, among others, were upstanding citizens in Guyana and convicted drug traffickers in the USA. Yet a narco-submarine was being built under Mr Rohee’s nose. We could settle for Minister Rohee’s ineptitude for comic relief but not when his grave failures are costing lives. The grand irony is that the PPP’s Indian supporters are exiting Guyana faster than they ever did under the PNC due largely to crime. Comrade Clement and his 32-point manifesto will assert in true deluded politburo fashion that there is no exodus and if a minor emigration has indeed occurred it most unequivocally has nothing to do with crime, but with the desire to propagate the experience of the safe and secure society they lived under in Guyana to these outside nations.

Yours faithfully,
M Maxwell