Dear Editor,
While some simple minds will get excited over the side issues of what Region 10 Chairman, Mortimer Mingo, and the PPP said or did or didn’t say or didn’t do, there is a bigger lesson in this entire fiasco. That lesson is bigger than any statement Mr Mingo makes or any cheque the Ministry of Housing presents. That lesson could not have come at a better time. Elections are upon us. It is a time for choosing a future for this country. The Mingo v PPP mess makes it clear that the PPP and the PNC cannot be trusted. A party is as good as its leadership and top personnel. Whether allocating prime state lands at Pradoville 2 mostly to their friends, colleagues and confidantes in their power circle or building mansions in a country where the majority lives in poverty-stricken shacks and simple homes, or the hypocrisy of asserting the LCDS was from heaven and begging foreign governments for climate change money while building palaces right on the waves from the Atlantic, the PPP and PNC have done enough damage.
Pradoville is built on a prime piece of land sitting in a prime location. A vital communications tower once stood there. It was not defunct by all reports. It was simply removed to make way for some exclusive officials to build mansions. Mr Mingo claims that Dr Roger Luncheon, Head of the Presidential Secretariat and the President’s right hand man, not the Housing Ministry or Minister, called him to offer him a lot at Pradoville 2. Was this claim by Mr Mingo a case of the Presidential Secretariat handpicking President Bharrat Jagdeo’s neighbours or of the Presidential Secretariat calling the shots on who got to live in Pradoville 2 and who didn’t? If Mr Mingo’s allegation is true, what jurisdiction does the Presidential Secretariat have to make offers on housing lots in exclusive schemes above the Ministry of Housing?
While this descends into a PNC versus PPP mayhem for the easily misled, I hope those with some restraint and commonsense left will stop and think. The PPP didn’t ask the Ordinary Guyanese Taxpayer if he or she wanted a lot in a high-end scheme with top-notch infrastructure. It asked Regional Chairman Mortimer Mingo. The PPP and the PNC do not care about holding local government elections so that men like Mr Mingo can be challenged in open elections.
If push comes to shove, the PPP and the PNC will together slice and dice up this country and fatten themselves. They have already done so independently after 28 years and 19 years of power. This is about the PPP and the PNC doing what they do best with power. They cannot be trusted. They are two sides of the same dangerous coin. But these two parties will go around this country in the next few weeks and try to corrupt the souls of many of our people. We have seen the Guyana the PPP and the PNC will deliver: a broken Guyana. As for you and me, the PPP will come around this election with fancy stages, speeches and music systems telling us that we should take our mud dam and lack of basic amenities in our housing scheme and be grateful to the PPP for selling us our own land for a profit.
Yours faithfully,
M Maxwell
