The APNU+AFC inherited a vibrant economy from the PPP

Sep 11, 2017 Letters

---

Dear Editor,
Last Thursday, September 7th, Kaieteur News featured an article in which WPA Executive Member, Dr. David Hinds believes, “For the good of Guyana… PPP’s barrage has to be countered and stopped.”
In this article, Dr Hinds was quoted as saying, “The People’s Progressive Party (PPP) has been peddling the perception that the APNU+AFC coalition is not only fraught with incompetent ministers, but also virtually incapable of running the presidency effectively.”
He added that since losing power in 2015, the PPP “has been relentless in its campaign to delegitimize the government, often without challenge from the governing parties.” Like other WPA members of old, David Hinds was one of those who fearlessly fought the PNC in the trenches for a better Guyana. But like Moses Nagamootoo and Khemraj Ramjattan of the AFC, he too has abandoned the noble goals of fighting for the downtrodden, and has now aligned himself with the oppressors for personal gains, much to the disgust of those who once admired him.
As a political commentator and civil rights advocate, Hinds jaundice views are often in conflict with reality, and exposes his biased preference. I admit that the PPP’s media blitz have indeed been relentless since losing power in 2015, but when we expose the remarkable ineptitude and incompetence of the APNU+AFC coalition he supports, and accuses the Granger Administration as being “virtually incapable of running the presidency effectively” because of the high numbers of “incompetent ministers” in government, it is not a “perception”, it is factually correct. And David Hinds knows it.
Perhaps he is making a pitch to take over the government’s PR department that has long been criticized as being hopeless. He argues, “The PPP’s barrage, in the context of weak responses from the coalition parties and basic errors of judgment by the government, has had the effect of casting doubt in the minds of Guyanese. The (PPP) party has also been able to successfully hitch its assault on the government to legitimate Civil Society concerns about protests against government policies such as the parking meter issue, the sugar impasse, the broadcast legislation, the vendors issue and the wages struggle.
This has led to the PPP gaining sympathy in sections of the media establishment, the business sector and the brown middle-class.” Did Hinds actually say that? Why is it that people like Eric Phillips and David Hinds always seem to view things through their ethnic eyes? Where were David Hinds and Eric Phillips, the Black-rights activists, when the government they protect and serve evicted 41 mostly Black cash-crop farmers from their farms in Naarstigheid, West Bank Berbice and took away their livelihood? The PPP did not do a color-test, neither did we ask what shade of Black or Brown they were when the farmers asked for our assistance. It was the PPP who defended their rights in the Courts, and I did not see David Hinds or Eric Phillips there.
But like some of his ilks, David Hinds is now an apologist for the Granger Administration. They have made campaigning and defending this government a profession. It is no longer about people’s rights, their interest is defending the perks they’re benefitting from. Like Nagamootoo and Ramjattan of the AFC, the WPA leaders have it good now. They’re the ones living the “good life” with the lucrative state jobs they now hold, doing basically nothing… just living off of the sweet.
Dr Hinds is so willing to excuse the government’s ineptitude as a learning curve, that he describes the continuous scandals and corruption as “basic errors of judgment by the government.” Yet under the PPP, basic administrative errors were described as “massive corruption”. And after two years of exhaustive investigations by SOCU, there is still no evidence to prove massive PPP corruption and the raping of the treasury.
These were all deliberate, fabricated lies and PNC propaganda designed to taint the PPP in government. The same, however, cannot be said about the state-sponsored corruption involving the rental of the bottom-house Drug Bond as payback for campaign contributions; the construction of the D’Urban Park white elephant project costing taxpayers over $1 billion; and the $632 million sole sourcing drug deal in exchange for a $20 million arch with the presidential seal.
Like his pal, Freddie Kissoon, David Hinds continuously propagates the notion that the People’s Progressive Party “ruined Guyana.” They are shamelessly trying to rewrite the economic and rights history of this country, when those two in particular lived and suffered through the perilous dictatorship of the Burnham era.
The 2nd President of the United States, John Adams, is credited with the famous quote, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
It was the prudent management of our resources by the PPP that Guyana had grown from bankruptcy in 1992 to the vibrant economy that the APNU+AFC coalition inherited in 2015. And I fear this government is determined to take us back to those dark, perilous times. Perhaps David Hinds is influenced by his friend Freddie
Harry Gill (MP, PPP)

---

---