A critic by default

Jul 11, 2012 Letters

Dear Editor,
Your Sunday July 08, edition carries a letter titled: ‘APNU’s ineptitude on the PAC allowed the appointment of Gitanjali Singh as Audit Director’.
May I be allowed to quote one of the less unsavoury comments: “I am a simple fellow with no stellar qualifications like Carl Greenidge and even I know it is downright dumb to rely on the advice of an adversary to weaken my position when such a self-inflicted blow would allow the adversary not only to get his way with ramming down an immoral, treacherous and conflicted act down the throat of an entire nation……”.
It is not my wont to make contributions of this kind (or of any kind) on ad hominem basis, particularly when it relates to a ‘simple fellow’ like your correspondent, who goes on (somewhat repetitiously) to excoriate APNU and specifically Carl Greenidge, on the assumption that he knew better of the procedures relating to the Parliamentary Standing Committees, than the Chairman of the PAC.
I sympathise with the outburst on the basis that I too was recipient of the same faulty information, which more deliberate enquiry proved to be inaccurate. One wonders whether this leak was inadvertently or mischievously contrived, and was influenced by other parochial considerations.
The confirmed fact is that it was the Office of the Clerk of Assembly who provided the combustible advice.
Notwithstanding, your correspondent’s ranting would appear to suggest that he succumbed to other commentaries which focused on one appointment to the exclusion of others. (It was unfortunate that SN did not publish the attached copy of the Conflict of Interest Code sent on June 28, 2012.) They would have discerned a reasonable basis for identifying, not only all the appointees (and indeed other personnel) of the Audit Office of Guyana as falling within the pale of conflicted interests; but most egregiously was the acting incumbent of the position of Auditor General ag.
The correspondent detours into a non sequitur when (recklessly) advancing the view that NICIL cannot be audited if the spouse of the Finance Minister is an Audit Director. This display of emotion is not supported by the Audit Act 2004 (which remains remarkably unread) which allows the Auditor General to appoint external Auditors.
En passant it should be noted that the Audit Office is itself subject to external audit. The same law constrains your correspondent’s ambitions to have the National Assembly revoke the appointments, since there is no legal provision to facilitate such action.
The tragedy about this outburst, under-informed as it has been, is that it will be digested and regurgitated by persons of equally misguided appetites, including those who find it opportune to target Carl Greenidge during this period running up to the election of a new PNC-R leadership.
Or perhaps I am just a simple fellow!
E B John

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