Cathy Hughes then and Cathy Hughes now

Oct 31, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – Here are the words of then Minister, Cathy Hughes addressing Mash celebrations in West Coast, Demerara in 2018: “Every way you turn, you see Guyana as a truly blessed country. Guyana is indeed a place like no other, and we draw strength from our capacity for real unity, diverse cultures living as one people, one nation with one destiny. Today we have another big reason to celebrate. We are witnessing the birth of a new Guyana, a different Guyana that will cater well for us all and for our children. Everything that is happening at this time gives us a feeling of excitement about our immediate future. I have a dream that our people, our most precious assets, will take this country to new heights. The young ones with all their verve and vivacity are the ones who will have the most advantages of the opportunities that we can grasp now.”

Here is opposition Member of Parliament in October 2022 writing in the Stabroek News; “I want to celebrate. This must be a good thing, something to celebrate but in a community where a small Icee soft drink costs $400, a small bottle of water $300, no phone service and the only communication with the outside world ranges from $2,000 for two hours of internet … there are few jobs, you must farm so you can eat, so your family can eat. The jobs available are as teachers, nurses, a medex or in the regional administration system so competition is stiff and it’s hard. The local shops depend on supplies to come in by air so you can understand the high costs. We complain on the coast but here you can appreciate how much harder life is. Will we see any of it improving the lives of all Guyanese.”

Now let’s do some analysis. Mrs. Hughes wrote her Mash panegyric in 2018 and she went on to be part of the government until July 31, 2020. If Guyana is in a terrible state as Mrs. Hughes puts it in October 2022, then the Irfaan Ally presidency in the most destructive government in history. Why?

Because it means that if Mrs. Hughes is correct about Guyana in 2022, then it took two years, and seven weeks for the current PPP government to go on an insane rampage. The juxtaposition cannot generate any dispute. In 2018, Mrs. Hughes painted a picture of a fantastic country whose phenomenal potential, she and her government shaped until they left office at the end of July 2020.

Two years, three months after, the same Hughes is lamenting a sad state of affairs. Any analyst then that sees credibility and validity in Hughes’s reflections has to provide the evidence of 27 months of PPP’s wanton destruction because destruction is what it is according to Hughes.

A country cannot be in the ethereal state that Hughes describes in 2018 and fall so low 27 months after Ms. Hughes left office in July 2020 without the government in the post 2020 period being a simply a wrecking machine.

It is incumbent that Ms. Hughes presents her evidence or be accused of crude propaganda. Professor Clive Thomas may be the factor to cite in debunking the nonsense of the failed AFC outfit. For readers who are not familiar with Guyanese politics, Dr. Thomas is on the same oppositional company as Hughes.

I will look at the 17^th birthday of the AFC and its evil explosion and implosion in a forthcoming column. But for now, let’s try to discern the volcanic death of Guyana after 27 months of the Irfaan Ali government according to the gospel of Cathy Hughes.

In an interview with David Hinds on one of Hind’s Facebook postings, Dr. Thomas says that finally with oil wealth, Guyana has got some resources to assist in poverty alleviation. So did the oil wealth bring any improvement to the Guyanese economy?

It is below the dignity of any academic to argue in support of Hughes’ thesis. Surely, there cannot be the denial that important areas of life in Guyana need improvement, one of which is elevation in the remuneration of public servants, policemen and other public sector agencies.

But there have been parallel levels of improvements with oil wealth that has taken this country way beyond the poverty levels Guyana has endured with the past 70 years. Mrs. Hughes is simply doing her opposition thing, and while she and her failed colleagues continue to do their opposition thing, the people they target with their propaganda have contemptuously left them behind. How do I know this? I see what takes place in my country. It does not mesh with the gloom Hughes portrays.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not this newspaper.)

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