Dear Editor,
In recent writings, I shared thoughts on local corruption not being abstract, and insights on the likely source of business wealth. In the latter, I referred to “the cost of doing business.” It is this specific point of cost upon which I now expand.
The two heads of the drug Hydra are product and proceeds. The first head is the shipment, delivery, and distribution of weight, serious weight in keys, to use the lingo. The second is represented by accumulating massive stockpiles of cold, hard cash. It is cash only for the myriad of exchanges that encompass the trade, whether from street level fixes or aircraft cargo drops. Dollars changing hands either by the suitcase full or truckload. Literally. Dollars bottlenecked and warehoused with nowhere to go. As an example, over two hundred million US dollars ($200,000,000.00) was seized in a raid in Mexico City in2007. There was so much money around that the walls were stuffed with cash. This is but one seizure, and a drop in the bucket, but imagine the influence wielded by a mere fraction of any such sum.
Respected judges, veteran law enforcement men, venerable politicians, ranking public servants, and senior banking and corporate officials have all fallen; so have men and women throughout the levels, and on less visible rungs of the ladder. All succumbed to the irresistible song of the dollar; many men and for many more dollars. Moreover, this has occurred in rich, sophisticated, and advanced societies.
The point is that the vast streams of available money tempted and corrupted individuals hitherto incorruptible; laid low men of honour and high ethical standards. It does not require any leap to appreciate how easy it is to sway those with lesser, or non-existent, scruples. To emphasize the staggering sums of money at hand, consider the following two situations. In Bolivia, a man named Suarez offered to repay the national debt of four billion US dollars in return for his son’s freedom. As if in competition, Cardenas, a Peruvian stood ready to make good on fourteen billion US dollars of his own country’s nation debt.
I think it is now timely to refocus to Guyana, with this background and reality in mind.
In several senses of the phrase, Guyana is an ‘open society.’ Open borders, open institutions, open for business politicians and officials; truly, it is open season for business. The cost of business could not be easier, cheaper, and more seamless. Here is a haven of depressed wages, poverty, cash intensive transactions, political discontent and convenience, non-existent retraining or detection mechanisms, among a plethora of significant exploitable weaknesses. Along with an exchange rate of 200:1, even Dionysus would be drooling and ecstatic.
There can be no question, that Guyana materialized as the perfect habitat to conduct business. In view of this convergence of elements and circumstances, the cost of doing business locally is minimal. It is where nothing is unrelated or innocent; none can say no; few have said no. It is why this threatens the nation’s viability and very existence.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
