Pepper sauce and sexual preference?

Mar 09, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Things are happening that are designed to kill any anger that will boil over from the CLICO disaster and NBS scandal. First it was the puerile attempt to connect the AFC with drug traffickers. This has to be the laugh of Guyana since the Dutch colonised this territory. Look who is talking!

Any serious media operative in this land that hasn’t come across materials that have highlighted a bridge between drug trafficking and persons that belong to the corridors of power should not be in the profession. The evidence is overwhelming.

So now we hear that AFC is linked to cocaine in pepper sauce. One suspects that it may have been expected that the media and civil society would have hit the roof and all thoughts would have been centered on this announcement, thereby taking away from the nefarious process still under way – the CLICO disaster and “NBSgate” (the reference is to Watergate).

It didn’t happen for one particular reason. This government is so burdened with scandals and has lost all credibility that people do not listen to what it has to say. There is no person in this country that has dissolved his/her mental uneasiness by the comforting words of the President that lost CLICO funds due to Guyanese pensioners, investors and others will be guaranteed by the treasury. Days after that so-called assurance, private hospitals refused to accept CLICO insurance cards.

It came down to credibility. The public relations quagmire in which the Office of the President finds itself is that it is not believed by the populace even if many of its explanations are valid and plausible. I don’t believe the pepper sauce drama neither does the vast majority of citizens.

From pepper sauce we go now to sexual preferences of taxation employees. The government is forcing employees of the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) minus the head to take the polygraph. Amazingly, one of the question is; “What is your sexual preference.” In the United States, Canada and the European Union, you cannot discriminate against citizens based on their sexual preferences.

Why ask such a question? I will come to that below. Trust Guyanese to have a prodigious imagination. Trust Guyanese to put the most hilarious interpretation to any tale in this land. In the days to come you will hear all kinds of rib-tickling chat about why that question was asked. On a most serious note it should never have been asked.

There is no evidence that since homosexuality became an accepted sociological process, male and female homosexuals are more prone to dishonesty, less patriotic and less professional. One of the modern world’s most active homosexuals was a man who was over-patriotic and in that attitude destroyed the lives of thousands of American citizens – J. Edgar Hoover, the longest serving chief of the FBI.

The lie detector examination is being refused by the targeted GRA employees and it may be a deliberate intervention to dampen the ongoing assessment of the CLICO disaster and NBSgate. The media should not fall into the trap.

The forceful polygraph and the absurd questions being asked merit media discussion. It is a separate issue that can stand on its own.

The Guyanese people would expect the media to report on it. But excessive emphasis on it could lead to the fading of the CLICO/NBS catastrophe. The media, the opposition parties and other stakeholders must not let the CLICO/NBS tragedy fall into the background.

The global crisis has come home to the Caribbean and nasty politics on the part of powerful politicians have made the situation uglier in Guyana. I repeat what I wrote in a column last week – a powerful person or a tiny group of powerful persons knew one month in advance that CLICO’s cash had vanished and to get their monies back, NBS was forced to buy out CLICO’s Berbice bridge shares.

This is a crisis that is only beaten out in importance by the assassination of Walter Rodney in the annals of modern Guyanese politics since Independence.

Too much of poisonous conduct unprecedented in the history of the modern Caribbean is taking place inside the halls of power in Guyana. Many of these serpentine conspiracies would have resulted in the angry ouster of the government in every other Caribbean country. Guyanese have put up with enough.

It is time that this nation demands an end to the lawless and immoral exercise of power. It is relentless. It is unbearable. When will it end? Who cares about pepper sauce and sexual preference when over 90 thousand persons will lose their hard-earned savings because of CLICO?

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