Dear Editor,
Having observed the successful demonization of a US presidential candidate who spent the majority of her adult life in public service by the self-serving millionaire Trump and his trumpets, and closer to home, the attempted character assassination and actual assassination of Ronald Waddell, my late partner and political activist, I am moved to speak on a similar matter that came up recently.
But first, some history: After the PNC’s loss at the elections in the early 1990s, I was asked by the new President, Dr Cheddi Jagan, to sit on the Board of Directors of the National Bank of Industry & Commerce. Several PPP members (including Mr Jagdeo for a while) were also appointed as directors, presumably to watch over the government’s, and I hoped, the national, interest. I was a little hesitant to accept the appointment, my numeracy skills being what they were, but I agreed to take on the responsibility, seeing it as my patriotic duty.
While a member of the Board, a decision was taken, presumably by powerful elements in the then PPP government, to sell our national bank to Republic Bank of Trinidad & Tobago.
No director was accused, then or since, of dereliction of duty or called to account. I don’t know what other directors knew, only that I did not know why the Bank was being sold, how much the Bank was worth to a potential buyer or how much it was selling for or was eventually sold for. This was not a Board matter!
In concert with a depositor, I subsequently moved to the court to challenge the right of the Trinidadian bank, in the name of ‘due diligence,’ to have access to the bank’s records.
I also wrote a letter to the press which was publicized on the radio where I described the bank as a cash cow and compared Mr Jagdeo, by then elevated to a high height in the nation’s government, to a ‘watchman’ who was not entitled to sell the herd of cattle he was charged with safeguarding.
As far as I know the planned due diligence did not take place, and the bank was sold.
Now this was our national bank, with branches countrywide, not a plot of land in the south of the city. And this was a well-run Board by Guyana standards, with well conducted and documented statutory board and committee meetings. That board experience and another one-meeting stay on another board caused me to swear off board appointments for the rest of my natural life in this country.
Before, and since the last elections, I have tried with little success to urge various government departments and civil society organizations to begin comprehensive governance training throughout the country, from top to bottom.
For the record, it should be stated that good governance needs to be accountable, transparent, responsive, equitable and inclusive, effective and efficient, participatory, consensus oriented, and must follow the rule of law. Tackling any single one of these elements will require a huge effort in today’s Guyana. The governance model and governance behaviours we inherited will take a lot of work and time to be transformed.
There is precious little that any one individual can do until the mountains of governance issues in Guyana are thoroughly and systematically addressed. A person of integrity is either faced with saying ‘no’ when asked to ‘sit on a board’ or say ‘okay’ when called to ‘duty’ and then find himself or herself compromised as a result.
President Granger, in an attempt to clarify Dr Rupert Roopnaraine’s role in the D’Urban Park initiative, stated that he had asked him to sit on the Board. Even before the President’s statement, I assumed that Rupert had agreed to lend his name to the project, probably without giving it a second thought. He would have seen it as a duty and as a means of encouraging a wider cross-section of Guyanese here and abroad to contribute resources to the 50th Independence project.
Guyana’s trumpets have now found another opportunity to sound off, to self-promote, and pretend to hold the political and moral high-ground by focusing on an individual who returned to Guyana in the 1970s without any inducements or rewards, with hard-earned high academic qualifications (not honorary) and made himself available for whatever work needed to be done, under circumstances not calculated to make him a favourite of those in power. And who continued working as the political environment evolved and continued giving generously of his time and talents in the national interest, even alongside opponents of the past.
This, in my view, was and is at the expense of the invaluable literary work that he could have and should have been doing, and, at the expense of his health.
And now he is being called on to clear his name! This disgusts and saddens me.
Yours faithfully,
Bonita Harris
