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Come on Ms. Manickchand!!

Oct 14, 2013 Letters

Dear Editor,
I have read snippets of Priya Manickchand’s piece regarding Geetanjali Singh’s employment within the Audit Department and cannot believe that a serving Minister of Government is so oblivious to the obvious consequential conflict of interest situation resulting from this appointment. I was so appalled at Ms. Manickchand’s defense of what would be abhorrent in any other democratic society that I was forced to stop reading and will only return to it when my blood pressure has returned to normal.
No one is disputing the points raised about Ms. Singh’s domestic motherly and wifely attributes.  In fact, they are irrelevant to the matter at hand.
What is frightening is that a serving Minister of Government in the PPP administration, in the year 2013, sees no wrong in having the wife of the Minister of Finance audit his work. Even more frightening is the fact that the Minister attempts to parallel this situation with the wife of an army officer’s wife working in a similar position.  How could someone, entrusted with the administration and/or management of a country’s affairs, even attempt to suggest that there is any similarity between the two situations?
For starters, the army officer is not the Chief of Staff. But even if this were so, he does not hold the purse strings of Guyana. That aside, he is a mere cog in the wheel of the nation’s military/defense machinery and not the chief cook and bottle-washer of finance as Dr. Ashini Singh is.
It is precisely because of the Minister’s observation that Ms. Singh “is the kind of woman where her husband will take centre stage in her life and where her role is to look after him” that makes her ineligible for the job. Such a wife would not wish her husband to be subjected to odium and ridicule (and possible incarceration) should it be discovered that not all the cookies he had been removing from the cookie jar were used in the national interest. It is therefore quite natural and not inconceivable that Mrs. Singh may tend to look the other way if she discovered some sort of malfeasance on the part of her husband.
If Mrs. Singh is as good an Accountant as we are led to believe, then she should have no difficulty finding suitable employment within the burgeoning private sector of which her husband’s government boasts daily. Why does she have to be placed in a position that gives rise to speculation about her professional integrity when she has alternatives?
Guyana today is faced with a serious problem where its leaders do not care about integrity in public office. It cannot have escaped Ms. Manickchand’s notice that the public purse has become a trough from which friends, supporters, hangers-on and cronies sup at will. It is this inconvenient truth that makes right-thinking people like Messers Goolsaran and Greenidge nervous that Mrs. Singh, by virtue of her position, is now the designated feline to arbitrate on whether or not her husband has been nibbling on the national cheese. Does anyone believe she will judge him harshly? I think not! We all know that sometimes, perception is greater than reality.
Why would Mrs. Singh, someone who is being portrayed as the consummate professional, jeopardize her professionalism and any modicum of integrity she may have, by maintaining her position within the Audit Department?  Why hasn’t Mr. Singh been losing sleep at night over the fact that there is the appearance that his wife was put in that position for a particular and sinister reason? What is it that they both have to lose by removing her and erasing any doubt that be in the minds of an understandably suspicious public?  There are more questions than answers.
Michael Persaud

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