The heist of Guyana, the Vice News investigation and patterns of corruption and bad governance by successive PPP administrations

Jul 27, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,

Kaieteur News – The more things change the more they remain the same goes the saying. Guyanese should understand however, that with Exxon in the picture, the stakes are much higher and we are in a very precarious situation with the current governing arrangement.

The VICE News documentary was not an overnight treatise, it took months and perhaps even years to gather the evidence, study patterns of corruption, interview informants, read documents and to fact-check information. By the way, a whole feature titled the heist of Guyana was featured in Kaieteur News many years before the Vice News documentary implicating the Vice President and PPP Government officials in bribery schemes and financially dubious “development projects.”

Most of us are familiar with the phrase, where there is smoke, there is fire. Between 1992 to 2015 several PPP Administrations was at the helm of Government and the Presidency. In total, between 1992-2022, the PPP governed Guyana for 26 years, with the last three years between 2020 to present. Such extremely long tenures of Government are similar to the tenures of dictatorships and provide a mountain of information that is useful for analyzing and understanding the proverbial nature of the beast pertaining to party’s culture, decision-making, how it exercises power and its relationships with formal and informal interest groups.

This letter is by no means an academic analysis of the PPP’s tenure; it is rather a reflection of patterns of behaviour and occurrences that have become synonymous with the PPP’s tenure in government as it relates to ethic relations, governance and financial corruption. The patterns highlighted below are well documented in local, regional and international print and audiovisual media and contained in unsealed communication between local embassies, in particular the ABCEU countries and their respective governments.