The President did make promises he never kept

May 21, 2009 Letters

Dear Editor,
I did say I’d end my exchange with Dr. Prem Misir in the letters column in light of no new material in his previous letter, but he somehow couldn’t resist the desire to spin and so this time he set out to prove in his latest missive, “Debt relief, gateway for Guyana’s development,” (Guyana Chronicle, May 20), where I said President Jagdeo made a promise or made promises and broke them, by selectively extracting a portion of my letter (‘Jagdeo can salvage his sagging legacy by restoring public confidence in Govt,’), and interpreting it out of context.

As a senior Government functionary, Dr. Misir either has a lot of time on his hands or he really is doing the job he was hired to: spin! Whichever is true, he still has to be exposed for doing a poor job as Government’s chief media spinner.

The context of what I wrote about had to do with the President’s statement in Trinidad during the Summit of the Americas that he will not seek a third term after 2011, and I reacted by stating that other noted politicians elsewhere in the world found ways to serve beyond their constitutional term limit, so his promise not to seek a third term was a comfort to a fool. Why Dr. Misir would use that as the basis for accusing me of insinuating that the President made and broke promises can only be explained by Dr. Misir’s job as a spinner to take anything anyone says and use it as material for media spinning.

As a Guyanese who has been observing this President’s autocratic style of governance, I really had to extend in the public domain the life of this issue of the President not seeking a third term because I have become firmly convinced that he does not inspire confidence in the people that he can be trusted with anything he says, anyway. He used to be deemed a nice guy in the early goings of his presidency, even if he didn’t know where he was going as President, but he has since morphed into an insecure and arrogant leader who trusts no one and lashes out at those he distrusts and dislikes. It’s almost juvenile, but it also smacks of a dictatorship in the making. So, yes, I would say he is not above the political fray of promise breakers, Dr. Misir.

Here are some examples: when the President promised he had a ‘firewall’ to counter the effects of the global economic meltdown, we did not know that his Government knew all along that CLICO (GY) was investing 53% of its funds overseas in violation of Section 55 of the Insurance Act. We did not know that his Government knew CLICO (GY) was about to lose over six billion dollars belonging to Guyanese depositors because of Government’s failure, through its Insurance Commissioner, to take punitive and preventive action against CLICO (GY) for exceeding the 15% overseas investment threshold. And we did not know that only a select few with inside ties to the Government and the Berbice Bridge Project were tipped off so that they were able to have their shares in the bridge project held by CLICO (GY) snapped up by the New Building Society, while others were left to wail and wonder. The ‘firewall’ promise was more like a ‘smokescreen’ designed to deceive.

In fact, many of us were not even paying close attention to the fact that the CEO of CLICO (GY) was also the Chairman of the Berbice Bridge Project (and a member of the GuySuCo board), so that there clearly was a conflict of interest that explained why the CLICO (GY) CEO was allowed to do what she did with depositors’ hard-earned money and not be punished by Government in accordance with Section 9 of the Insurance Act.
And even when he promised depositors they would not lose their money (because of Government’s failure to do its job), they lost it anyway when CLICO (BH) collapsed taking CLICO (GY)’s 53% stake with it.

What he then tried to do later on was to make up for his broken promise by telling depositors that claims will be honoured by way of Government dipping into public funds with a promise to have the money repaid over 10 years. Guyanese who are depositors with CLICO (GY) and Guyanese who made contributions to the NIS over the decades are losing twice here and they’re not seeing the trickery of inept politics at work, but the truth is this Government was silently acknowledging it was culpable for what happened to CLICO (GY) at the people’s expense.

When the President also said he knew who killed Minister Sash Sawh, and we looked forward to the killer having his day in court, the President’s knowledge was never proven via our justice system, because one of the alleged high-profile triggermen ‘escaped’ from police custody only to be killed by the Joint Services a couple of weeks later. No evidence was tendered in a court of law proving the suspect was the killer.
When the President also said he will release video tapes of PNC officials mingling with dangerous criminals in Buxton, and we looked forward to the release of the tapes, we never saw the tapes. When he promised in 1999 to clean up the corruption among Customs officers, we did not know it would have taken him nine years to make his first move, and we also did not know it would have been done through a controversial polygraph system and not through a standard criminal corruption investigation that could stand up in a court of law.

I don’t agree that promises made while serving as President involving his domestic life, which became public knowledge, should be added to the list of broken promises, but I am sure there are other promises the President made to the public and broke that Guyanese at home and abroad can recall, so someone has to tell Dr. Misir that the wicket he is bowling on is not taking spin anymore; only pace, so he either change to pace or spin his way back to the pavilion.
By the way, the caption of his last missive, “Debt relief, the gateway for Guyana’s development,” is so at odd with commonsense, which says Foreign Direct Investments should be the gateway for Guyana’s development. But then again we are dealing here with a Government that has made debt relief, not foreign investments, its priority.
Emile Mervin