Presidential nonsense

Mar 18, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I am absolutely sure that the decision by President Ramotar to reject parliamentary appointments to an authority to supervise the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to monitor money-laundering did not originate from his head but within the hierarchy of the PPP and an incapacitated Luncheon may also have added his voice.
It is not only the rejection that is nonsensically based but equally so the reason. Mr. Ramotar has opined that parliamentary selection of the authority would politicize the process. His alternative is a body that consists of people who have no independence but are appointed by Mr. Ramotar and his PPP. These are heads of some important state institutions.
Here is the thing. In Mr. Ramotar and his PPP acolytes’ epistemological understanding of politics and life, the presidency and the Cabinet are not politicized institutions, only Parliament is. Whereas the President and the Cabinet dropped from the sky and assumed public office, the Leader of the Opposition is a politicized animal who belongs to a political party and so are his colleagues in APNU and the AFC.
To conclude then, in the collective mind of the PPP, Parliament dabbles in politics not the President and his Cabinet.
In the collective mind of the PPP when you appoint the head of the Central Bank and the Police Commissioner and other State functionaries to comprise the authority to oversee the FIU, the issue is not one of politics because these State employees were selected by men and women who dropped from the skies and did not come from a political party. Only Mr. Granger, the APNU and AFC people belong to political parties.
Isn’t this pathetic nonsense? Isn’t this rascality of ideas? Isn’t this vulgar hilarity? Let us expose this pathetic attempt at intellectualizing on the part of the President and his cohorts. The US Government informed President Bharat Jagdeo that it would be unwise to confirm Henry Green as Commissioner of Police. Look which country made that opinion – the US whose scientific equipments in gathering intelligence on security and narcotic issues are ultra-modern.
The US can tell the Guyana Government more about drug traffickers here than the Guyanese police would ever know in hundreds of years.
Any fool would know that the US had intelligence on Henry Greene. But Greene was confirmed and by whom? Yes, you are right! A president named Jagdeo who dropped from the skies, not a man who won the presidency after becoming the presidential candidate of a political party.
In other words, Mr. Jagdeo was not a politician or a politicized person. He was Guyana’s neutral president.
Such asininities inform the PPP position on the authority that will monitor money-laundering in Guyana. So a year before the Police Commissioner’s contract renewal comes up, he defies the PPP hierarchy and participates in the FIU’s investigation into one of the PPP friends who has a lot of money that suddenly dropped in his lap. And he expects to have his contract extended? Which head of which State institution is going to disregard the subtle and not so subtle hints of the leadership of the PPP about who to protect and who to leave alone when it comes to the sudden accumulation of vast wealth
and yet expect contract renewal?
The amount of absurdities we have inherited from the British is simply incredible to believe in the 21st century and the stories are essentially full of stupidities. Do you know the Police Commissioner is independent of the Government but the circus comes into play when you find out that he is appointed by the Government? The University of Guyana is a legally autonomous body but its present Council consists of seven card-bearing members of the PPP and four PPP Parliamentarians.
I repeat; it is these asininities that the PPP is asking the opposition to accept. Should the AFC and APNU concede to this clownish approach, then they surely are no better morally than the PPP. And for civil society and Guyanese in general to accept this corrugated approach to civil servant neutrality under the PPP is to admit we are unfit to be a modern country.
But here is another thing. If Parliament is going to politicize the issue because Parliament is a politically driven body then why are Cabinet members still sitting in Parliament? Why is a PPP member who is a Minister of the Government and a Parliamentarian less political than Mr. Granger and Mr. Ramjattan? Of course no one should pay attention to the Private Sector Commission (PSC) who takes the same position as the President. With each passing day, the PSC is becoming more irrelevant to the fight for a democratic Guyana.