Corruption and incompetence: what next and where

Jan 30, 2023 Letters

Dear Editor,

Kaieteur News – Daily, the Speaker of the House mutates into a more endearing, intriguing, and inspiring figure, who delivers the spectacular. Often, I ask myself if he understands the sacrosanct nature of the House he presides over and what characterises the work of Speaker of the National Assembly. It is my position that corruption and incompetence are national in scope, enduring essences of parliament.

Corruption and incompetence are more of the parliamentary than what is now a parliament in name, with grand abominations saturating. Both belong, both have relevance, both have been singular attributes of our august house, a parliament of the less than sensible (a euphemism), and a parliament of a word that begins with the letter ‘w.’

I believe that too many in parliament are both corrupt and incompetent. Show me their works of incorruptibility and competence, and I will yield, withdraw; smatterings only. I grapple to decipher intellectual construct, ethical underpinning, and mental soundness of whoever is the author of this ban. Though a public figure of the now fabled prowess of the Hon Speaker is marginally capable of something like this on this own, it requires the extraordinary to transform the nationally notorious to the globally ludicrous. We are already a universal joke; thanks Mr. Speaker, for the encore. Never before has someone given so much, so eagerly and so valiantly, for party in defiance of the parliamentary; ultimately, country. I ponder how he will purge corruption and incompetence from the Public Accounts Committee deliberations, records.

Weighing this Speakership gem, the grand sweep of his glittering pettiness is singular for parliamentary pettifoggery, of unprecedented leadership profoundness with a special twist. The Hon. Speaker advances recklessly into the pristine wilderness of mental puniness, the luridly self-demeaning. I discern a testimony to profanity overcoming profound. In America, this would be denounced as un-American; in Guyana, it is All Guyanese, the now irreversible norm.

In contemplating this newest pillaging of standards, this pilgrimage into parliamentary decay, I fervently hope that the Minister of Education doesn’t imitate, decide to ban both corruption and incompetence from all of this nation’s institutions of learning. Meaning, in textbooks, in oral instruction, in written form, in classroom. After all, corruption and incompetence are not only unparliamentary, but both are also now un-Guyanese, so alien they are to the local environment and culture. Going higher, I hope that the Attorney General refrains from introducing a bill in parliament (where else, folks) that makes it a crime to utter words like corruption and incompetence anywhere. This could be extensions of the charades lived with here. As the Speaker, the parliamentary defender of an obscene faith, banned, then the two offices mentioned could make a clean sweep of things by suppressing expressions found offensive.

I have news for Speaker and masterminds: somebody is going to have to lock me up. For, presently, the thought is to stand outside parliament, before high official residences, and workplace of those with Far Eastern friends, and shout those two words at high volume repeatedly. I would do so as a test case to the face of any creator of this singular mockery of what characterizes local reality through and through. Today it is corruption, tomorrow it could be that other national blackeye -discrimination. And when incompetence could be denied its rightful putrid existence, then insipidity and deformity become embedded norms. It is where the coarse and common have become the commonplace. And this we are supposed to cheer, think infinitely better. As I think of the noble Speaker of Guyana’s now derelict House, I salute him for his finest hour yet. Corruption and incompetence are both older and more rooted than the Republic itself, but in one fell swoop, Guyana’s most admired Speaker vanquished both into non-existence. Well done, Mr. Speaker. Now, if we only had more like him, then Guyana would be at the head of the class. Just don’t ask for what, and in front of whom he would stands as the first among equals. I inquire if this means that the media must follow suit, constitutional freedom of speech and all….

Sincerely,
GHK Lall