Dear Editor,
I refer to the letter titled, `Two cases outlined do not pass muster’ (SN June 9). Since my longstanding practice is to glance at most articles and go my way, this one almost passed me by. Now I must make an exception to my hard rule of not responding to, or engaging with, what is considered to be not meriting the dignity of a comment, even a read.
The writer took the issue that I raised about Messrs. Thomas Nestor and Hilbert Knight, the two inexplicably terminated senior black employees of the Guyana Gold Board (GGB) and somehow ended up in the realm of my tenure as chair of said GGB, and what was done and should not have been done under my watch. I am still at a loss at how the issue, as I tabled it, of evidentiary racial discrimination in these jarring firings have any relation to my record, or lack of one, at the GGB. What is the nexus? What is it that shapes such thinking? I used to be astonished at such antics before; but for a long while now, I recognize them for what they are: red herrings intended to distract from the issue at hand. What used to lead to distaste, now merely triggers humour. But I still have to ask: do some of our public commentators (a euphemism) have no moral, ethical, or intellectual bedrock from which they operate? I find this most regrettable, and it is even more regrettable that these shallow subterfuges must be corrected, no matter how repugnant the task may be.
Editor, for the record, I have been away from the GGB close to a year and a half now. When that is added to what took place in the early stages of my 3-year stint at GGB, it certainly took an inordinately long time for the PPP to find some kind of “horse as an ambassador for an ass” (Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost). That is, drum up what is patently dumb and dumber. Whether bauxite or timber or other precious products and commodities, a poor Third World society, always in need of scarce foreign exchange does not hold on forever to its production. This is what was done with the same gold that the writer now conveniently rediscovers and represents to be lost opportunity. The reality is that massive losses were being sat upon (in a costly losing gamble) by the then PPP administration, with enormous double-digit billions on overdraft at the Central Bank, and for which frequent ‘dunning’ inquiries were the order of the day. Indeed, it was nearly the same multibillion-dollar story at the Ministry of Finance, where similar deficits existed.
It took the PPP brain trust approximately over four years to come to the hindsight of what shoulda, coulda been. Like so many others chasing fool’s gold, the party’s leading lights were gambling on an ever-rising gold market, and when that collapsed, the bag was left for others to carry. Honest, dogged others. Guess who? Now, several years later, there is this perfect 2020 vision of what should have been done, and with what result. Whether that is so or not is open to endless back and forth, of which I will have none. Never-theless, the original issue still remains unaddressed: how does racially charged firings of dutiful and honest Guyanese relate to my leadership and world market prices, and their possibilities? Instead of a robust defense, there is only the delicately filigreed syntax and offerings of underlings seeking to protect overlords, through dodgy dissemblings.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
