The times have changed

Apr 09, 2014 Editorial

Many people say that the ruling People’s Progressive Party is the late Dr Cheddi Jagan’s party. Indeed it is the party of the late Dr Cheddi Jagan, but it is a far cry from the party that Dr Jagan envisaged and attempted to fashion.
Many things are different; the people are no longer the grassroot people who walked with the people whose support they needed. The party members are more self-serving. At a glance they appear to live ostentatiously. The average Government Minister lives in a house that is palatial by the standards Jagan set way back when.
Indeed the party people are better paid because they have access to large sums of money. People who need special favours are not averse to paying for those favours and the beneficiary of the person’s gratitude is not immune to being treated gratuitously. There are people who would go about and tell their friends that they are lucky to have known such a party official.
The link is expanded and pretty soon many people seek the services of this government official, each offering something tangible. Such a system is said to have been in operation in certain Government Ministries that process job permits, residency standards, and other things pertaining to immigration matters.
It is said to be the same with things pertaining to business and to issues of tax collection. It is to be expected that Guyanese businessmen would seek to pay as little of the due taxes as possible. This is where the country sees a growing brand of young people sporting untold wealth without the tax man batting an eyelid.
This happens because in the days of Dr Cheddi Jagan, anyone reported to the late President Jagan would have been sent packing. Today, report as much as one wants, the mantra is for the complainant to provide the proof.
Society has changed with the times. In the last days of the People’s National Congress, businesses placed orders via telephone. That, then, had to be followed by mailed invoices. It was a tedious process. The facsimile (fax) came and things moved quicker. In fact, there were people who called the fax machine the invention of the Twentieth Century.
Today, the speed of communication between the buyer and the seller is unimaginable. The computer was the first instrument to facilitate such transactions. Today there are hand-held telephones and other gadgets that allow for easy communication. These gadgets also permit bank transactions and it is here that certain activities, even the nefarious, are facilitated.
For all the talk about Guyana moving into the Twenty-first Century, we are still lagging far behind the rest of the world. We have no legislation to deal with cybercrimes and amidst all the hullaballoo about money laundering, we are still incapable of following the paper trail. A man can move millions of dollars to a convenient location and the authorities will be none the wiser.
Such loopholes allow for the corruption against which Dr Cheddi Jagan railed. The absence of legislation to cater for cybercrimes is what helps people to steal from banks. A bank teller can easily transfer cash to another account because our laws, as they stand, dictate that there must be the actual removal of cash. It is the same with our politicians who, until now, can move their money around with impunity.
When the commercial banks reported suspicious transactions in keeping with the existing anti-money laundering legislation, the authorities could have done nothing. So we had a head of state who could have received two containers of house-building articles and who could have claimed them to be gifts. There is a law about gifts, but our head of state back then did not worry about the law because nobody raised a query.
People within the ruling party are aware of those things that their founder found abhorrent but which have become a way of life for today’s leaders. They talk, but they simply cannot complain, because there is no one in authority to whom they could protest.