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A few continue to criminalize Guyana
…‘They behave and operate as if they are too big to be jailed’ – Dr. Thomas
Guyana is in a sad state; the country is a victim of gross financial abuses and the culprits somehow feel that they are above the law and cannot be sanctioned.
President Donald Ramotar
Professor emeritus, Clive Thomas
That is the view expressed by Professor emeritus, Clive Thomas, who said that Guyana has degenerated and that the government continues to criminalize the state.
Dr. Thomas’ presentation was titled “Promotion and degeneration of the criminal state” and came at the recent Working People’s Alliance (WPA) symposium held at the National Library.
The recently retired professor said that the evidences of gross financial abuses reveal a potentially unfolding lethal sequence of political explosions.
He said that the blatant financial lawlessness inevitably fuels both authoritarian and criminal behavior and noted that the mixture of these two “pathological forces” is likely to provoke further systemic and systematic degenerations of the state.
Dr. Thomas advised that separately and together systemic and systematic degenerations will extend well beyond the characterization of the Guyana state as a vehicle for promoting criminal endeavours.
Thomas said that there is an obvious on-going criminalizing of the state.
In this regard, he said that, even in the face of “growing inequality in economic, political, social and cultural outcomes the ruling cabal of politicians, businesspersons, criminals and hangers-on have put themselves so far above and beyond the law that they behave and operate as being too big to jail”.
Prorogation fuels financial lawlessness
Dr. Thomas said that the People’s Progressive Party (PPP/C) administration may very well be using prorogation as a tool to further its habits of financial abuse.
He said that in this regard, it must be observed that the People’s Progressive Party PPP/C Government has effectively exhausted the limits of its minority status coming out of the 2011 elections.
Thomas said that the PPP/C government “with its authoritarian and criminal admixtures, when faced with a no-confidence motion it could not win, has had to respond to the crisis of governance in the only way it could, with yet further excursions into lawlessness and undermining of the Constitution.”
Dr. Thomas said that objectively, prorogation facilitates the entrenchment of executive financial lawlessness, abuses and irregularities.
He reasoned that if Opposition surveillance of the Executive’s financial misbehavior has been constrained within a functioning National Assembly, then it is very ikely to be much more so following its prorogation.
Furthermore, he pointed out, prorogation quashes on-going financial matters before the National Assembly; “principally in this regard are Financial Paper 1 of 2014 and possibly others related to unauthorized and excess expenditures for 2014, as well as withdrawals from the Consolidated Fund; the laying of the2013 public accounts for audit; and the Anti -Money Laundering & Countering of Financial Terrorism Act (AML&CFT). As a consequence therefore, prorogation diminishes oversight and control of the Executive.”
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