The damaging widespread pollution of corruption

Apr 17, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Corruption is now more than a national sickness. Corruption is a cancer that keeps marching straight ahead, while spreading treacherously and uncontrollably across this society. The most innocent of things, the best of what is promising, is twisted and turned into the monstrous deformities with which citizens must live. Most of all, it is those trapped and hapless citizens who pay year after year the debts piled up, who are supposed to benefit, but many times are left wondering what they got, if anything. They are not a part of the party, not a party to the multimillion-dollar corruption practices and festivities.
Almost a day doesn’t pass without some media report of huge public works projects in motion. These works of the state involve massive amounts of money, the hard-earned dollars that Guyanese taxpayers’ part with from their pay cheques, the transaction they engage in that are taxed, and which sums go to service debts incurred in their names. The public works projects are about positive developments, which on the face of them, if carried to full and honest conclusion, hold many benefits for strapped and needy citizens in numerous communities.
The reports are of schools and health clinics and bridges, and potable water facilities to be built. In the Guyana of today, ten million or a hundred million for such projects are considered to be less than impressive, a bit on the poorer side. Today, Guyana is awash with projects that cost a billion here, and another over there. Now that is talking about visionary projects and the kind of money required for them. This is where the trouble lies, where it begins, continues, and flourishes with unchecked abandon.
It is because here we have those in leadership positions, and those in their close-knit surrounding company, who see projects as not an opportunity to serve the hopeful people of this country, by doing good and delivering completely what was promised, what is due. Rather, these multimillion works and billion-dollar projects in this administrative region and any others named for a facility that is needed, is seen as a grand opportunity to make gold while the going is good. There is a whole cast of characters, it is better to call them for what they are, Guyanese predators of the most voracious kind, who feast on these projects in what they rip from them, and the fleshy, juicy parts that they tear out for themselves.
There are elected political officials and public servants and private contractors who know how the system works, where the money can be extracted (stolen), and who are their allies in many grand schemes. A hundred million or a billion possess a great amount of room to seize something criminally for self, and for those who are part of the ripping off, gouging out, and paying off crew. Because those involved have been engaged in such criminal practices for so long, they have gotten very skilled at stealing, of shortchanging the people who are paying for the shoddy work they do. They are also very good at getting away with the endless corruptions because they know what follows afterwards, how toothless, and meaningless, are the checks and balances that are in place.
The evidence is there in what Guyanese have been reading and hearing from this source for years. It is of collapsed roads, of shabby buildings, of bridges that crumble, and of other projects that suffer the same cheated fate. And as we examine the long record of all this, it is now powerfully obvious that corruption is not just a crime, not merely a cancer, it is a circus also.
There is an Auditor General who probes, reports, and exposes, and as immense as those are, there is the understanding that some costly issues could have been outside the reviewing microscope. The Parliamentary Accounts Committee meets, questions, denounces, moves on. Everyone moves on because no examples are made of those who cheat the taxpayers. No one is punished, nobody pays a price for their corruptions. That is, except for the taxpayers who live with what falls apart, and pay from what they don’t have. Corruption is killing most Guyanese, while some Guyanese make a killing.

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The damaging widespread pollution of corruption

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