Dear Editor,
I tip my head to SN’s October 1st editorial captioned `A filthy business.’ It is a sweeping work capturing the externals of a business so bad, so rotten, and so loaded with the putridity of Guyana that that title is an understatement.
Say gold, and pork-knockers comes to mind. I detect good PR for gold chiefs, Guyana’s equivalent of that unholy American union, the Teamsters, who tout that they are for the small fry, when it is all about themselves, the big fish. Respectfully, pork-knockers and smaller miners are that imaginary creature of which politicians love to speak called ‘the people.’ It’s a blob and a nice blurb. SN had it right, the big boys control gold’s playing field, and use the little people as cover and leverage for their big plans, bigger portfolios of ever-increasing assets, not limited to the precious metal. The mining constituency could be a two to three seat political party, with a little bending of the math. This gives recognizable muscle, which is made even bulkier by hundreds of millions (individually) in political gifts.
The little people toil as listless and lousy freelancers prospecting on tiny plots, the eternal story of the small man shaking and baking and hoping to strike it rich. He has his media uses, though he doesn’t vote in crucial gold affairs, has minimal standing, and is generally voiceless and powerless, until special interests need to marshal those for expression. For their interests and pockets. This is how PPP and PNC governments bow to the special interests, which are less than a dozen. It is about receiving and giving back.
Regarding fallen gold declarations, that came as a surprise when reported due to two critical developments, which the big miners monopolized for lucrative advantage. The first was all the incentives lavished on the sector, since 2020, which SN rightly penciled in the ledger as payback. I recognize the slick political trick of taking taxpayer money and giving it to gold sector donors for their cash contributions during elections. Payback with interest. The fancy pants boys call it redistribution of money/wealth. Yet, for all of the PPP’s sure-handed investments in the upper tier of the gold sector, declarations fell, and kept falling. Second, President Ali himself guaranteed the dismantling of “onerous regulations” and he is not one to break promises make to local financial heavyweights, who had trouble producing books and records. Who wants to record criminal activities in books? Common knowledge, I assure everyone. That freedom should have opened the door to a flood of gold coming out of here. The foreign concern was where it could have possibly come from, beside Guyana’s soil.
Enter the Royal Canadian Mint (RCM), which is Guyana’s RCMP, when gold is involved. Well, the rest is history, and it is a sordid one. Somebody had to watch the store, and the Hon. Attorney General has his hands full dealing with that can of nettles, where the angles are being worked. He must have kicked that nasty, stinking gold-plated can upstairs. I speculate on whether the President overplayed his hand, underregulated too much, and left no safeguards. The Vice President, never one to avoid the limelight, got into the swirl of things and declared gold smuggling over, regardless who say what. The things that spring from his head; as usual, he left the big man from the Central Bank to clamp down on naysayers with that beauty about confidentiality. I love these brothers, really do. What is steady and straightforward in this stew is that the CFATF people are peeping over Guyana’s shoulder at this high-risk gold sector, which should give the distraught AG still more fits. Of course, since we now have oil in copious quantities, the Yanks and Canucks are no longer as keen about money laundering, blacklisting and sanctions, and all that imperialist garbage. Oil is bigger fish frying.
Considering the PPP Government’s budgetary allocations for gold, and the President’s ringing commitment on rules and regs, I think it is crystal clear that the large gold people enjoy protected species status. This explains the whole shove down and tumbledown among police, government, gold principals, and grieving family members on the Main Street murder that embarrasses all that shoot the breeze (and bull) on it. Somehow, SN let that stay in cold storage. Gold is beyond filthy business, and SN did try valiantly with the sweetly murky. The gifted in Guyana get down in the underworld gutter and always come up looking smeared in gold. Midas should have had it so simple and easy.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
