Do the right thing, Mr. President. This is a contract of absolute shame!

Feb 28, 2018 Letters

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Dear President Granger,
This is an open letter to you, Sir.
In Chapter 4 of your book, Public Security, page 31, writing about the government of Bharrat Jagdeo, you affirmed as follows: “the administration …has signed the appropriate international conventions such as the UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. But it has failed to appoint appropriate personnel, provide adequate resources, or enforce the relevant legislation…”
From these salient lines, in your book of brilliant speeches on security matters in our country, it is obvious that you appreciate the need for the appointment of “appropriate personnel” to perform certain vital functions in the administration of the business of the people of Guyana.
In the administration of your government to date, you have not been paying heed to this vital principle that you yourself warned President Bharrat Jagdeo about. Since I have mentioned Mr. Jagdeo twice, let me tell you straight off the bat, like Brian Lara, that I, personally, professionally, politically and otherwise, have absolutely no use for Bharrat Jagdeo. That man failed dismally to perform his duties in the best interest of Guyana, when he was President of our country.
Please read my following lines with an open mind, and with absolutely no doubt about my political intentions. My only hope is that you, Mr. Granger, do not join Bharrat Jagdeo in the cesspool that he chose for himself and all memories of him for the rest of his miserably wicked days in our country.
Mr. Granger, history has given you the opportunity to do better by our country, and I beg you, please, President Granger, as Kaieteur News has been honestly admonishing you, please, do not force us to have to deposit you in the same garbage bin where we deposited the shameless Bharrat Jagdeo, who single-handedly basically destroyed anything decent we may ever have had in our sad country.
Now, back to the matter of “appropriate personnel” that you warned Bharrat Jagdeo about, you have realised by now what an abject shame it is for Guyana and Guyanese everywhere in the world, that we are associated with the signature of this unspeakably horrible, shameful, ugly, depraved contract with ExxonMobil.
As Guyanese, we are forced to hang our heads in bitter shame, and with tears in our hearts and our souls, when we consider that this cesspool of a contract was supposedly read and studied by a group of legal professionals and other technical officers of your government.
Mr. Granger, they are all university graduates! All your top Ministers are university graduates, Mr. Granger. Didn’t they know that they had to organise multidisciplinary teams of professionals in various fields to properly go through that contract with a fine-toothed comb, and prepare solid observations and recommendations to the Prime Minister and yourself, Mr. President?
In New York these days, I just have to hang my head in shame every time our Trinidadian, Bajan and Jamaican friends bring up this topic. I just don’t know what to do with my Guyanese self these days, Mr. President.
And to add insult to injury, when Kaieteur News brought ExxonMobil’s international nastiness in matters of oil exploration in developing countries to the attention of your government, Mr. Granger, do you recall what your Minister of Foreign Affairs said? Let me remind you. Minister Carl Greenidge took such great offence at Kaieteur News, in the performance of its noble work for the people of our country that his knee-jerk reaction was to describe us as “those jokers”.
I feel sorry for you and for our country, Mr. Granger. Stop sailing the way President Ramotar sailed. I believe you deserve better. If you still secretly have even an ounce of confidence left in your Foreign Minister, then let’s do better than Jagdeo did; let’s do the “appropriate” thing, Mr. President; the people voted for a change, Mr. Granger, not an “exchange”.
Get Mr. Greenidge to stop calling legitimate Guyanese “jokers”, let him make amends by putting together a multidisciplinary team of “appropriate personnel”, to thoroughly review this shameful contract, and save yourself the certain future embarrassment that this matter will mean for you, your children, grand-children, great-grandchildren, and for all the people of Guyana.
If you fail to do this Mr. President, you will unfortunately be no better off than Bharrat Jagdeo in the minds of the people of Guyana and our Caribbean friends and neighbours. Sixty years from today, ExxonMobil would have gobbled down all our billions of barrels of oil, paid us “thirty pieces of silver” in return, and Guyanese would be as dirt-poor as we have always been, with the brutal consequences for our economy and our “Public Security”, as already well detailed in your brilliant book by that name.
I trust that you and Minister Greenidge will read these frank but well-meaning words with an open mind, and “wake up and live!” Do the right thing, Mr. President.
Yours truly,
Sasha Persaud

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