Dear Editor,
It is now an established fact of life here, an inseparable aspect of Guyana’s political culture, that when a party succeeds at the polls, their own people have to be taken care of first. And the closer they were to the captains and chefs, and the harder they worked, the more has to be found for them. Though I have little regard for this kind of ‘meritocracy’ it is just the way things work here in this society. We could make fools of ourselves by talking about the best people for the job at hand, but nobody is going to fool me with that one, either.
Put a man on a board and there is sure to be some self-help involved somewhere down the line. It could be with who gets a contract, who is bypassed, and who could deliver on a piece of the action. Their political leaders know it, they know it, and the public knows it. As I heard a maan seh following one election: ‘is we turn fuh teef.’ Another version of that is ‘we in chaage now’ and ‘wee gah de powah.’ And by now all should know, whether they are stealing or not, the full extent of what that means. In a word: self-help; in the extended version of that, or help those paying.
Last year, some sensitively placed officers turned cartwheels, danced on their heads and all but tried to walk on water to make elections turn out a certain way. Around the same time, there were disclosures about who got huge patches of land; of course, everyone was smart enough to have an oral alibi at the fingertips. It went a little like this: ‘deh took the precaution of recusing deh self’ which I am not falling for. A little later, the reports were leaking out about who is moving how much money from which government agency, which almost daily audit revelations are bringing to light. Nice country, we have here! As I think of these things, I ask myself two questions: how did we ever allow Exxon to outsmart us? And the second being, since all say that they did no wrong, but plenty money missing, how come more people are not in jail? Since I am on a roll, I am going to go for it and try one more: with all this scheming brainpower at our disposal, will somebody explain to me, how is it that we have so much trouble with elections?
Editor, it does not matter whether it is the PPP in power or the PNC handling the reins of office, it is the same nasty, dutty story over and over again from their people. As evidence, I point to the jaw dropping that has occurred at the Demerara Harbour Bridge. Millions are paid to a Trini company that did not officially exist at the time. That one is not so bad, since around here that is about horses for courses. But the one that brought me to a dead stop involved a disclosure about some piece of gold jewellery worth almost a million dollars. That just can’t be! How could any man believe that he could do something like that (allegedly, of course) and nobody would have a problem with something of that magnitude? Or that he could get away unscathed from such a caper?
Since we have no meritocracy, I suggest stop sparring over political appointees and get rid of all of them. Thus, there is parity.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
