The idiotic, ignorant, pathetic nonsense of Minister Ashni Singh

Dec 07, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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The High Commissioner of one of the top economies and democracies of the world must have cringed in her chair when she heard the most appalling idiocy that came out of the mouth of the Minister of Finance, Ashni Singh.
Canadian High Commissioner, Dr. Nicole Giles, had to listen to one of the most imbecilic political statements about global politics ever to be spoken by a Third World politician. Singh’s words were not only the ramblings of an ignorant mind, but a disgraceful manifestation of the abject failure that Guyana is. Every educated citizen in this land should feel embarrassed at what Singh said. Such foolishness calls into question the very foundation of Guyana’s fabric.
Speaking at the annual awards of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Minister compared the United States to Guyana in terms of democratic humbugs. He says the US is 238 years old, yet has some of the same democratic stalemates as Guyana which is just 48 years old. To buttress his unenlightened opinion, he quotes from the Economist magazine, which observes that the US Congress is more interested in playing politics than solving problems.
The really ignorant section of this primitive viewpoint is the age of the United States that the Minister cited to score his political point. He didn’t score anything but put his crass thinking on display. It is Guyana which is just 48 years old that cannot afford the democratic in-fighting, not a country that is 238 years old. In 238 years that country would have built up strong institutions, cultural foundations, stable structure of mores and values, extensive and massive economic systems to withstand domestic assaults on democracy.
Guyana cannot endure the in-fighting, because it doesn’t have the insulations that the US carved out 238 years ago. For an economist, Singh displays immense ignorance of political economy. Simple economics could have instructed Singh that you cannot compare the US and Guyana on any level on anything.
As an economist, Singh would know that if Banks DIH, DDL, the Beharry Group of Companies, Continental Agencies etc., suffer a major loss, the years of existence of investments, capital accumulation and insurance would not devastate those long-standing Guyanese companies the way it would if a bug infested the entire crop of a small agricultural investor. One swipe and that small investor could be totally wiped out.
What makes Singh think that the hectic quarrels between the legislature and the presidency will bring down the US? It will not and it cannot. It will certainly do so in one of the poorest countries in the world that is just 48 years old. What is troubling about Singh’s arid, jejune, and morbid comparison between the US and Guyana is his ignorance of the US economy.
The US is the world’s largest economy with corporations whose combined earnings are in the trillions. One US trans-national corporation, like Kraft, Microsoft, etc., earns hundreds times more in one calendar year than what Guyana makes in ten years. Singh is comparing the world’s largest economy that produces fantastic inventions in science, medicine and technology with dirt-poor Guyana.
When Congress goes into a tailspin, the business companies are so busy making money that they don’t even notice that Congress and the President are fighting. Perhaps the most stupid content of Singh’s observation is that he forgot to mention that poor Guyana continues to lose 14 persons a day to the US and loses 82 percent of its citizens who have a tertiary education. The US keeps getting people. Guyana keeps losing people.
Does Singh believe that the disputes between the legislature and the presidency in the US, given what the Economist stated, will hinder the US economy? As an economist, does Singh really believes that? It is in dirt-poor Guyana that that will happen, not in the US. Finally, what someone in the audience should have told Singh before he took his seat is that while he was speaking, at that very moment, the no-nonsense citizens of the US were on the streets in New York protesting police brutality.
Someone should have told Singh what the citizens of Miami did last year when a man shot an unarmed civilian. Someone should have mentioned to Singh what the people of Ferguson did when the police shot an unarmed youth. Someone should point out to Singh what kind of people Americans are – they would not allow their government to brutalize them.
Here in Guyana, Singh and his acolytes in power under Messrs Jagdeo and Ramotar, and the PPP, could inflict any bestial insult to the Guyanese people, and this sheepish nation will take it. If Guyanese were like Americans, Singh, Jagdeo and Ramotar would have been gone a long time ago.

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