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John Magufuli, Joe Harmon and Nietzsche
It was featured in most of the major media houses around the world when President John Mugafuli of Tanzania cancelled government-sponsored Independence and Christmas celebrations and assigned the sums
saved to fight cholera, buy medicine and improve health care. He also ordered the cancellation of a ceremony sponsored by Parliament, and the money went to buying hospital beds. Mufugali also issued an edict to Ministers to curtail trips abroad and cut cost.
From Independence right up to President Granger, we, in Guyana have never seen such realistic recognition of a country’s financial limitations. In political theory it is called transformational leadership. In this country, every senior and junior minister, senior heads of important departments and chairpersons of many governmental boards, drive SUVs that drink gasoline. The gas bill under Jagdeo’s regime was unimaginable.
A top Ministry of Finance official in 2007 told me that the bill was exceedingly high because vehicles that were supposed to be left in the compound after 5 p.m. were used for private purposes. The forensic audit of GWI revealed that a vehicle was used by the son of the CEO, Shaik Baksh who crashed it. At the time, May 2015, Baksh’s son was using the vehicle for private purposes when he had no authority to be in possession of it. Baksh agreed to pay GWI for the vehicle in June 2016. One can just imagine if the PPP didn’t lose the election, Baksh would not have been made to reimburse GWI.
The GWI incident is definitely one in hundreds where under the PPP’s hegemony money was spent by State officials as if this country was an industrial, manufacturing giant of the developed world. Imagine if Jagdeo and Ramotar weren’t toppled by the 2015 election how much more money would have been wasted. One would have thought that emulations of President Mugafuli’s pragmatism and commonsense would have been seen by the Guyanese population soon after the Coalition Government came into being.
The men and women who came into power in May 2015 told the nation in the most barefaced fashion that they wanted to eat their cake yet have it too. Most people in the world grew up with the saying, “some things are lost when some things are gained in living every day.” Many big wigs in the APNU and AFC government gave themselves a stupendous salary increase for the reason that is best summed up in the words of Joe Harmon. He said that he cannot work for $500,000 a month when that was the salary he paid his junior attorneys at his law firm.
Harmon got so many blows for that statement that I don’t know how he was able to recover. But Harmon was never given credit for his honesty and candour. He was the only one from the Coalition that openly said I want the power I now have, but I also want the big salary I used to get before I became a Minister. No other Coalition big wig was that frank. They went about telling people how drastic will be the reduction in their earning power now that they are Ministers, but they were never honest to say that it came at the expense of the power they now possess; power they wanted to have and currently enjoy.
All over the world even wealthy folks would like to have state power. Some American tycoons would love to become Ambassadors or Cabinet Ministers. Our Coalition leaders wanted power, but didn’t want to lose the money they earned before the Coalition victory. So they quietly gazetted their whopping salary increase until a pro-PPP newspaper brought it to the nation’s attention.
Up to this day no journalist has put the question to the Coalition leaders that it was either power or money, but it couldn’t have been both. For me this was the first sign that the post-2015 leadership of Guyana would not come in neatly wrapped transformational gift sets.
Next was the colossal expenditure on the Durban Park project for Independence Day. No one big wig in the Coalition Government thought of following President Mugafali. If small contractors are still owed $200 million then how much did that project cost?
As usual in authoritarian Guyana (which is the story of our lives and the story of our history), the nation does not know what the expenditure was on that project. That money could have gone to buying essentials for the Georgetown Hospital where it has been reported from time to time many patients share a single bed and it was featured in the papers where a mother and her child slept under a bed because beds were in short supply. Where is Nietzsche’s Übermensch?
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