Corruption and the corrupters

Jan 29, 2020 Editorial

We at this newspaper can tell the public exactly what happened. And this is without reference to any of the sleazy litany of exposés shared in these pages. We have to start somewhere to dig out from under the mudslide of dirty money matters, which will now be done, in no particular order, but beginning with the man from the UK.
The caption from KN on January 5th relays the sorry state of Guyana: “Investigations into grand corruption during PPP era in office will go nowhere.”
According to the Britisher, Dr. Sam Sittlington, once in a crucial role at SOCU, “key records either locked away, burnt, or missing” and thus, “it is a lost cause.” That is a mouthful and then more, isn’t it?
Record a hat trick of them,for the slick, clever corrupters. And while at it, this is just another kick flush in the teeth of the Guyanese taxpayers. Down and out, it is yet again for that hapless, beleaguered breed.
Let’s look at that one more time: “will go nowhere” and “locked away, burnt, or missing” and “lost cause.” There is a certain finality about them, a damning void left and nothing to pause or change the course of future events of the same corrupt pedigree.
Congratulations are due to the intellectual and political authors for orchestrating all these corruption success stories.
With no records to piece together and parse through laboriously, there is nowhere to start, no dots to connect. Corruption was and is a major industry in this country, with huge growth prospects, given oil. And so, too, is the machinery in place to cover for those comrades and circumstances that roar of what is wrong and wretched for this society, but which will continue unaddressed, unresolved, and unabated. Records locked away or missing might as well be nonexistent, since they are either long gone and shredded to the winds or buried deep or fed to the sharks, or somebody will arrange for the blowing up of cabinet or safe to ensure that nobody gets near to the paper dynamites.
Come to think of it, the thieves and their leadership cronies have it within them to go so far as to burn down the building, which houses incriminating documents.
As said before, there is a whole apparatus in place to make such things happen, to prevent with absolute certainty any of the sleazes coming to light.
But there is more, since law enforcement itself-the investigating people is riddled with compromises, swathes of the judiciary suspected and untrustworthy, and then there is still another component that tells how deep and dirty and dead this corrupt nation known as Guyana is to the core.
Under Exhibit Number One can be lumped all those cases that never made their way past the governing political directorate. That would be this Coalition Government. It was where senior men sold out the taxpayers, now wooed as voters, to return favours to the opposition people for their generosity during their tenure.
This was a peculiar kind of power sharing, which was really about spreading the wealth and looking out for one another. At certain levels in this country, there is no government or opposition adversaries; there are only comrades and conspirators, who put heads together to work things out for predetermined outcomes and rip off the Guyanese public some more.
It is why a number of reported strong cases never went anywhere, to the dismay and disgust of the few toiling, honest professionals, who tried to get to the bottom of the things that cost this nation so much.
From all observations, from the wisdom of commonsense, it is beyond debate and argument that enormous amounts of money were stolen.
Like the man from the British Isles said, “It’s a lost cause.” Today, they campaign.

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