Guyana has an enduring, incredible moral repugnancy

Nov 30, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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I cannot understand and will never understand how a boss can berate an employee for driving over the speed limit, but his child for whom he is responsible and supports does the same thing but he does not say anything about it. No great philosopher can use theories and concepts to justify such moral repugnancy. Such moral double standards cannot be justified.
In my praxis which began since I was sixteen, I have seen this moral duplicity in every realm of human existence in Guyana; political parties, Governments, businesses, church, media, civil society, human rights community, the police force, academia, youths, NGOs etc.
The latest manifestation of this incredible, Faustian, Mephistophelean, permanency is the AFC. In Georgetown, five AFC leaders in its 13-member Management Committee met one Monday evening at the office of an AFC minister to choose an AFC person to fill the vacant GECOM commissioner’s post. They chose Trevor Williams.
Those five persons had no moral and legal authority to do what they did. An emergency meeting of the Management Committee (MC) should have been summoned. That is the body that makes decision in the absence of the General Executive that meets every three months. Eleven of those persons in the management committee could have attended a meeting at the AFC office in Kitty.
But those five persons met and anointed Williams. But this moral depravity had an even more degenerate dimension. After the President chose not to select Williams, the very five persons agreed to call an emergency MC meeting to discuss the Williams rejection.
It was alright for a small clique in the AFC’s leadership to nominate a GECOM commissioner but it was important to call a leadership meeting to denounce what President Granger did. In other words, President Granger must embrace accountability, moral guidelines, transparency and democratic instincts in decision-making but not the AFC leaders. The AFC has behaved like this since it got into power. The WPA behaves like this all the time.
The WPA requested an urgent confabulation in July with President Granger to demand that he consult with the WPA, a partner in the APNU when important decisions are made about state and government. It wanted assurances from the President that WPA as a constituent part in APNU will have its ideas and programmes accepted into policy-making.
The President and his delegation agreed. But the WPA does not practice inside the WPA what it wants Granger to practice inside his government.
There were two letters in the media by Tacuma Ogunseye accusing Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine of refusing to discuss government’s business with the WPA’s leadership. We have reached a stage in the affairs of the WPA where its representative in government, Roopnaraine, does not have a clearly worked out portfolio and Roopnaraine sits on a chair whose wood is made of confusion. He resigned, recalled the resignation, and the WPA said he did not inform the party when he retracted his resignation.
Where are accountability and democratic instincts in this dance of the macabre?
I have seen these moral double standards all my life in this country. I read letters by a senior academic at UG telling the government and policy-makers what to do but he never writes about his workplace which is an equally troubling place. He recently published a letter about how the AFC and PNC should operate as a coalition but the man stays away from UG matters. One would like to think charity begins at home. In fact it does.
This country’s head of the Transparency International branch in Guyana is a UG lecturer. He is in the media at least once a week lecturing the government on transparency and openness. Last week he was berating the government in vehement language about its secrecy on the oil contract.
Guyana saw an interesting but comical situation a month ago in one of the editions of this newspaper.
This gentleman was chastising the government for not disclosing information to the public and in that very issue the newspaper carried a news item in which the two UG unions, with the photographs of the two presidents, accused the UG administration of lack of transparency and accountability. This gentleman never says a word about anything at UG. Surely charity begins at home. It does.
I have no respect whatsoever for the Private Sector Commission. This very body was not only reticent but supportive of a government that made secret deals that you need a computer to count how many. Suddenly, these businessmen discovered in 2016 that the government of the day must meet its obligations to the citizenry. Funny! Very Funny!

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