A good country run by monkeys is still a zoo

Mar 22, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I got this quote from a book on management principles I was reading the other day but instead of country there was the word “company.” I thought it was appropriate to use in the analysis of the failure of politics in Guyana, particular the two decades that the PPP has been in power and the twelve years Mr. Jagdeo has been President.
For a majority of observers, this is a wealthy country, with fantastic potential and fairly good people but the perennial problem is its politics. The supporting evidence is graphic. We may have in Guyana, per capita, the largest Cabinet in the world. Yet development eludes us. What do the Ministers and their countless consultants do?
Many years ago, I penned an essay on the so-called self- importance of these incompetent leaders in the PPP and the friends and family members they employed.
Pick up the phone on any day, at any hour during working time, and these people are either at a meeting or otherwise engaged. But you never see the results of their “busy” schedule. The Guyana Government lost around three billion dollars in 2010 because it was late in submitting its sugar plans to the EU. Where were the “busy” Ministers and their consultants?
Mr. Jagdeo accused the World Bank of tardiness in dispensing the first installment of LCDS funds from Norway. The truth finally came out. To secure the funds, the Government had to submit its projects for which the money would be used.
What was nauseating and most sickening in this situation is that the Office of the President (OP) has an LCDS secretariat and dozens of millions (maybe hundreds) have been spent by this unit but Mr. Jagdeo, his Government and his consultants, are yet to tell the World Bank how and on what they plan to use the Norwegian cash.
There are two Ministers of Education and “nuff” consultants in that Ministry. In addition, the PPP itself has an education secretariat that includes Ms. Gail Teixeira, Prem Misir, and Hydar Ally. Yet the UG Strategic Plan was sitting in the Cabinet since 2008 and was only discussed last year.
In a country of just over 700,000 what do these little dictators do with their time?
Mention must be made of the collapse of GuySuCo. They packed the leadership of GuySuCo with their own people. From 1992, there was a tempestuous disruption in the upper structure of GuySuCo. All the appointees under the PNC were either fired or left after humiliation. It is an area of marginalization that the PNC, ACDA, GHRA and the AFC have not documented.
At a stakeholders’ meeting with the ERC last year, I sat in close physical proximity to a certain PPP presidential candidate. When I brought up the curse of racial discrimination he said to me that the PPP Government has not been taken to the UN by the opposition and if there was ethnic bias the PNC would have done just that. He was right. The PNC, AFC, ACDA are yet to do what the PPP did when they were in the opposition – expose the sins of the ruling regime to the international community.
Back to GuySuCo. For 19 years PPP dominated the hierarchy of GuySuCo and today the imminent collapse of this corporation may very well cause the PPP to lose the next general election. One of the PPP presidential contenders sat on GuySuCo Board all through the long years of PPP’s hegemony since 1992. The logical question stands – what have they been doing all these years?
Today we are back to our working schedule after a long holiday weekend and the phones will ring and the customary female voice will come on the line and tell you that the Minister is at a meeting.
After 19 years of making policies for the nation, these endless confabulations must have produced something positive. It doesn’t look so. The fascinating curiosity of course is what do they talk about at these endless engagements? The answer is nothing.
One has to understand the psychological destruction colonialism brought to the Third World. It reduced colonial leaders to baggage boys. After the colonials left these baggage boys had to prove to the world that they were as important as the people that ruled them. So they built presidential palaces, large armies, invented huge bureaucracies (remember how large is our Cabinet) etc. And of course they have to be seen attending meetings all the time. It gives them a sense of importance.

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