Dear Editor,
I read with amusement the PYO challenge to the appointment of Trevor Williams as Director of Youth. Really, I thought. Because what we are witnessing from the PPP today represents a descent from their normal standard of hypocrisy, into one of outrageous hypocrisy.
I am not an attorney, but I do recall coming across something called the ‘clean hands’ doctrine in civil matters. The internet explanation I found that best describes it states, “The clean hands doctrine is a rule of law that someone bringing a lawsuit or motion and asking the court for equitable relief must be innocent of wrongdoing or unfair conduct relating to the subject matter of his/her claim. It is an affirmative defence that the defendant may claim the plaintiff has ‘unclean hands’…” Whether this doctrine is applicable to civil matters in Guyana I have not the foggiest. Its utility for me, and for the general public I hope, is to highlight the flexibility and relativity that shape and form the moral and ethical precepts of many in the PPP leadership, and of course its youth arm, the PYO.
I mean when one observes the Orwellian-like shenanigans, arguments and propositions, both in and out of office, that emanate from centres in the PPP, they have the facility of giving rise to a paradox of emotions, from apoplectic hilarity to deep sadness, indignant outrage, to immense joy that they have been booted from the stranglehold of power they exercised over Guyana over the past 15 years or thereabouts. For if nothing else, leaders should at least attempt to practise what they preach, be willing to provide to others, that which they demand for themselves. For after 23 years of an expressed and manifested political policy that being elected endowed them with the entitlement to wield unitary power in every aspect of the administration of Guyana, the PPP seem to be experiencing some very strange epiphanies these days.
One has every right to question the integrity of the PYO in the objections they are raising over the appointment of Trevor Williams as Director of Youth in Guyana. For I searched and I searched, but nowhere could I locate even a nugget of similar outrage when Kwame McCoy, who had been appointed to the Rights of the Child Commission, was allegedly caught on tape in an inappropriate conversation between him and a youth. Were they in hibernation then, not bothered by the allegations against someone appointed to a commission ostensibly dedicated to protecting the rights of children? Or maybe, they had not yet begun to experience the epiphanies that seem to be belabouring their newly discovered consciences about what is right, and what is wrong today.
We see the arrogant fulminations erupting in the wake of the GuySuCo Board being dissolved, or agency heads being sent home because of the abuse and incompetence that were a feature of their management of those agencies. They launch into vituperative accusations of “witch hunting”, when they had made that practice a fine art over the last 15 years or thereabouts. When journalists and social activists were being thrown overnight into stinking lock-ups for merely protesting the environmental conditions of the final resting place of so many of our loved ones. When a social activist like Courtney Crum Ewing was being arrested for daring to protest before the chambers of the Attorney General over his Freudian slippages that were caught on tape.
If your moral compass accommodated the prioritizing of government paid cosmetic dental embellishments for ministers and others, while small children in Guyana died for want of coin to get them overseas for some lifesaving operation, then you can hardly expect to be taken seriously when you beat on your chest today and act as though you represent some paragon of virtue. I saw a YouTube video recently where the fiber optic cable being laid to enhance communication in Guyana, could be seen in two exposed strands just under the surface of the water where it had to cross a river. Was the person charged with the management and responsibility for laying this cable, paid an exorbitant amount for so doing, even marginally competent and qualified for that task? Do you wish to revisit the competence of the editorial staff of the Chronicle, who carried one of the most vile and racist tirades against a particular group, and which the PPP government by virtue of its refusal to publicly disclaim it, and being at the time in total control of that print media apparatus, obviously endorsed. Give me a break please!
Look, I have no idea whether the qualifications and experience cited in the PYO’s civil suit are valid in terms of what is required for the position of director of sports. However, I have zero faith in the veracity of anyone expounding on behalf of a regime with the kind of moral and ethical disfigurements that framed the tenure of the PPP regime. My position is that people who have lived in a compartmentalized glass infrastructure for two decades, are the last ones to be throwing stones at others. The vice of hypocrisy is like a virtue for those who revel in it.
Yours faithfully,
Keith R Williams
