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The Integrity Commission
Where is the money? Why give the much-heralded Integrity Commission a car without gas, and a mass of people to beat, but without a stick? If this sounds like the familiar Guyanese saying of ‘geein basskit fuh fech watah fuh bade duck, it is. Again: where is the money?
How are these people going to do this job? The people sliding and evading must be laughing their heads off. What a commission! What a country! What a comedy! Those same ranking public servants are laughing in their Heineken and Johnnie Walker (green). Some of them can afford it; they have the green from delivering the goods.
Incidentally, such delivery is not to the once-vaunted, now flaunted and mocked integrity Commission. The commission is lucky if it gets the time of day, or a declaration. This is what it has been reduced to: inoperable, if not comatose. What a racket!
Make a grand speech. Swear in some willing and ready people. Point them to an uncooperative crowd long set in its lovely ways. Set them to work. And then leave them to their own devices. No tools. No resources. No oxygen nor lifeblood. That would be cash. How is this job going to get done? Well, that is the problem. Nothing doing.
The wise fellows (big guys and gals) knew that from the get-go. Thus, they stalland stonewall in sturdy defiance of this appeal, that reminder, and every warning sent their way. From the inception they knew the score. Seniority has its heights from which to survey the landscape and behave accordingly: deliver nothing. Guyanese public servants may be dumb, but they are not stupid. They know the score; they have a grasp of the interlocking networks and territory. There is no danger; no exposure, no penalty forthcoming. They knew this all along.
It is why they are nonchalant and without worry through a year fading into the duskiness of yet some more smoky inconclusiveness. For here it is in September and the Integrity Commission has embarrassed itself by pressuring lackadaisical Guyanese public servants to toe the line, only to get a kick in its face before a watching, disbelieving society. As expressed earlier, the cunning local public servants know what they are doing, that nothing is going to come from deliberate failure to own up and pony up.
The word to the Integrity Commission was get lost. Cash would give some muscle and some standing to tangle with the big dogs. Somebody did eat the Integrity commission’s lunch; it looks emaciated: no cash transfusion; no respect from the untouchables and unresponsive.
It is always challenging to send the impoverished with plastic pitchforks and barefooted to clear the way. Not when they are going after the rich and powerful; the well-entrenched and obstinate. Failure results. Check the Integrity Commission.
The integrity Commission is now rapidly resembling the lore that was of pork-knockers of yore. Like those hardy pork-knockers, things started out with a shout and a song. The difference is that the Integrity Commission has no hundred-dollar bills to light to search for what is missing in the darkness. The well-meaning commissioners can’t see their way.
They are left open-mouthed, empty-handed, and heavy-hearted; they have no strength to chase after those who taunt them through denial after denial, and who then flaunt every appeal with silence. Quite reasonably, this hard question must be asked: was this Integrity Commission ever intended to be genuine in the first place? That is, to have the teeth that terrify the tardy and tawdry? And the host of other duckers and dissemblers, who rule supreme and untouchable?
Unsurprisingly, there is much rejoicing in the land; but it is not from the ranks of the Integrity Commission. It was saddled with the futility of frustrating exercises in the meaningless. It knows better now: as in minding its manners and watching who it pushes.
Maybe next year things will be different…. Oil promises to bring much cash. Some of it could wash downstream to the Integrity Commission. There is one problem though: too late. Too late to matter when the floodgates have opened and the attention of the nation is riveted elsewhere. Good hunting! Nice country this is.
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