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Is Jagdeo the new messiah against corruption?

Aug 09, 2015 Letters

Dear Editor,
My pursuits since the 2015 elections campaign have taken me on a different course and thus I do not pay much attention to verbal emissions from Freedom House or in particular the pedantic nonsense associated with their leader, Bharat Jagdeo. But I was sent a piece from the Guyana Times captioned “Jagdeo unveils massive corruption scandal” dated August 6th, 2015. It cannot be logical that persons within a crooked institution that siphoned off billions of state resources for over a decade in a corrupt manner, to lavish on their best friend by way of single sourced pharmaceutical contracts, now have the brass to pretend that they are the new messiahs on a crusade against corruption.
The essence of the statement was that  he (Jagdeo) believed that the forensic audits were “initiated in an illegal nature”.  He pointed out that the APNUAFC Government provided these auditors to its staunch supporters namely Dr. Anand Goolsarran and Mr Christopher Ram.  What poppy cock!
The Procurement Act, 2003 states clearly that a procuring entity may single-source when:
“owning to a catastrophic event, there is an urgent need  for the … service… making it impractical to use other methods of procurement because of the time involved in using other methods of procurement”.
The Minister of Finance was totally in order to use the services of anyone to conduct these forensic audits using sole sourcing, because it would have been financially imprudent to take over the financial books without establishing the closing balance sheets and income statements at each entity after over a decade of PPP financial skullduggery. If full tendering processes were used, the earliest these audits would have commenced would have been the end of July 2015. That would have been too late for the new APNUAFC Government and would have provided enough time for the PPP operatives, still in the system, to cover their tracks.  Today we would not have had a former PPP Minister and potential PPP MP in front of the courts for a serious allegation of fraud.
What I cannot support is the single sourcing of the annual audits, since that is a programmed activity that is planned for well in advance.  However, these forensic audits are a one-off emergency and thus qualify for single-sourcing.
As to Dr. Goolsarran, I personally know of situations where he was asked to join the campaigns but both in 2011 and 2015 and on both occasions he politely refused, stating that he really enjoys and values his work in civil society especially what he was doing at the Guyana Chapter of Transparency International. I personally engaged Dr. Goolsarran on many issues of a technical nature and on every single occasion, his advice was always technically clear and never political.  So it is most dishonest to brand this brother as a political supporter of any political party. He lives a simple life and just wants his homeland to be a Mecca of good governance.  He see himself as one of the custodian of good governance in Guyana and therefore you will never find him building any Taj Mahals by the seaside on two massive mansion-lots with taxpayers’ money.  He shops at the market just like the ordinary people with his own money and does not run around the world living like a Caesar on the resources of the ordinary taxpayers.  It is grossly immoral that a paper Maharaj who feasted off of the people for years now wants to attack this almost Gandhian figure just because he is doing good work at exposing the financial skullduggery of the PPP King Kongs.
In conclusion, I observed of late, that the PPP operators have launched a campaign of extreme misinformation through several mediums, be it the Guyana Times, Citizens Report, Progressive News and the Mirror Papers.  Clearly GINA and NCN are ill prepared to respond to this barrage of misinformation on the actions of the APNUAFC Government emanating from Freedom House.  Yet to date, the independent news houses like Kaieteur News, Stabroek News and Capitol News cannot secure a radio and TV licence to bring balance to this situation. This topic of the issuance of radio and TV licence to the professional news agencies has to be urgently revisited, so that we can empower the professionals to bring greater balance to the airwaves.
Sase Singh

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