The thieves among us

Dec 20, 2015 Features / Columnists, My Column

---

All week last week people were smiling to the point of stretching their mouth permanently. The announcement had come just days before that most of them would be going home with $50,000. And while they were smiling some were frowning because the government was moving to repossess their home that had been given to them under certain conditions.
As a people we are always seeking ways of outsmarting everybody. That is how some of us who own homes enter to get land as though we were among the people who needed a home. This was tolerated by the previous administration because the powers that be could not take the time to investigate all the applicants, especially if they appeared to be supporters of the party.
I know people who got land and became speculators in the same way some people acquired property on Pradoville 2 then sold for a whopping profit. So now we have a political issue. The new government is moving to repossess and the political opposition is shouting discrimination.
I still remember when the government removed political types from the public service. There were shouts of witch-hunting. Of course the loud shouts caused the government to back off slightly. But the evidence that emerged from the investigations showed that the government was also doing a lot of speculation with public funds.
People had long suspected that money was being siphoned and shipped out to foreign accounts. There was nothing anyone could do, because there was no law to get the money back. The foreign countries respected one’s privacy and while they frowned they could do nothing. Now those countries feel that it is their duty to help the new government.
Aeshwar Deonarine paid himself some $28 million and when asked about the money he told the government that he would repay it. Then he finds himself on a plane to Toronto, Canada with his family. I asked myself how was it that he was able to leave Guyana. Simple people who just sought to leave after completing a government scholarship could not leave. Their passports were stamped and the airport had a list of their names.
I could not even think of leaving Guyana for five years the first time I completed a scholarship. I had attended the Government Teachers’ Training College.  The truth is that I did not want to leave anyhow. Then I got another scholarship to Jamaica and again I could not leave.
My daughter pursued a scholarship in Venezuela, came home and worked with the Guyana Agricultural and Industrial Development Bank for four years until the bank folded. She got another job with Scotia Bank, but that was not considered part of the scholarship arrangement. It mattered not that she had remained in Guyana for more than a decade. She was taken off a plane heading to New York.
But Deonarine merely walked out. And now I learn that there was another who was wanted for questioning. He too managed to leave. I am told that treaties are one-way streets. If the United States wants a Guyanese we must send that person. The converse is not true. It is the same with Canada, but now there is legislation to help Guyana recover the money shipped to those countries.
One former Permanent Secretary used his mother and sister who are living in the United States to keep his money. I am certain that his elder brother did the same with much more money than some of us can contemplate. I am told that the government has a list of such people. The parents and siblings have a hard time explaining the extra cash.
There are those who also have a hard time explaining the disbursement of funds from the public treasury. Winston Brassington is being called a liar by the Chairman of the Linden Interim Management Committee. He reported that he spent at least US$10 million on Linden Mining Enterprise.  This has not been proven, so we have to find out where the money went.
He was at the Ministry of the Presidency on Wednesday, but a few weeks earlier I learnt that he was moving out his entire family before Christmas. Did the police put tabs on him?
These things are being talked about at this time, because when the government was in the opposition it vowed to jail the wrongdoers. People are waiting and patience is growing thin. If I had stolen anything I would have been in jail.
A 22-year-old man slashed a woman and stole her handbag on Thursday. On Friday he began serving a three-year jail term. The bigger crooks are allowed to walk almost untouched. Some of the present day rulers say that these crooks have institutional memory, that they are useful at this time. That may be the case, but anyone trained in economics can be worthwhile replacements.
The cold hard fact is that we the people of Guyana want our money back. That $50,000 bonus could be so much larger if only we get back money that could have been used to advance this country. Indeed it is Christmas, the season of giving, so it is that the crooks must give back what they took.
And while we are looking at the rogues and vagabonds I could not help remembering that some of us had been thieves from a very early age. There was this fellow who described me as being the head of a scandal sheet. His comments were made in the National Assembly on Thursday.
Joseph Hamilton may be a good boy these days, although one of his relatives was implicated in the theft of some computers from the One Laptop Per Family Programme. As a schoolboy he got the name Pholourie Joe in his native Beterverwagting.
Nicknames are always related to some incident and to this day more than four decades later, he is still known as Pholourie Joe.
He was at St Mary’s-ye-Virgin Anglican School, outside which an old woman had a stand. Among the things she sold was Pholourie with plenty sour. Joe, as he was commonly called, could not resist stealing the old woman’s entire bottle of Pholourie and hiding to eat it in school. Immediately he was baptized and the name still sticks to this day.
I may head a scandal sheet, but the story is one scandal I would never forget. I wonder what he did with the bottle. I know where the Pholourie went. He was never charged and there is a statute of limitation to such crimes.
Pholourie Joe escaped with that crime. His colleagues in the PPP will not escape as he did.

---

---