Corruption in Guyana

Feb 17, 2024 Editorial, Features / Columnists

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Kaieteur News – The PPPC Government has this habit: any group, any entity, any individual that reports about corruption in Guyana, or takes it to task for the deepening corruption culture, or other failures is automatically branded in one of several ways. It is that group or person, foreign or local, is nothing but a scaremonger, a doomsayer, a sensationalizer, a deviator, or some biased agitator.

We are searching and waiting for a single admission, even an acknowledgement, that there is, indeed, a problem in this or that space, and that some curative work is necessary, and that it will be done. The PPPC Government is too arrogant, too contemptuous, to lower itself to such a level, where only some genuineness is called for, a little sincerity of which it seems utterly incapable.  Acknowledgement of reality and admission of some responsibility are solid first steps.  The World Bank reports on hunger and it is the Coalition.  The IDB reports critically about hospitals, and that is the work of the group now in opposition also.  No question, the preceding Coalition Government accumulated its own grim tally of corrupt practices.  However, the rating of Guyana on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) actually improved (41-point score/rating) during its less than a half decade stint at the helm.  During the long 23-year tenure of the prior PPPC Government the rating had fallen below 30 points, which was very close to ground zero, when corruption measurements are involved.

Now Transparency is back with its dreaded CPI number, and Guyana is just limping along on the corruption road.  The numbers are telling: after three years under this government, Guyana is ranked 87 out of 180 countries.  This dumps it in the bottom half of countries laboring with corruption problems.  Greater levels of transparency and oversight are recommended, and those seem like an old song heard before, but leading nowhere.  President Ali had initially made transparency and accountability the centerpieces of what his PPPC Government’s visions and practices were going to be about.  From the record of the last three years and more, those centerpieces (transparency and accountability) seem to have been taken off the table and sent to the mortuary.

A notable element in Transparency’s global report is the slackening of accountability for public officials.  Ask most Guyanese about their perception of public officials (elected and selected) and the first word that emerges is corrupt.  Just as worrying, Transparency highlighted that those who need access to justice find the doors closed because those with power and money have hijacked whole justice systems.  This is a deep-seated sentiment in Guyana, where equity and justice have different degrees of relevance and application to those with power versus those who don’t.

When reports like these are mentioned to government leaders, it is revealing how they rail when pushed with related questions about transparency (contracts, reports, and so forth).  As they do so, Guyana still finds itself ranked among some of the countries which are the dregs of the earth where corruption is involved.  In 2022, Guyana was neighbor to the likes of India and the Maldives, which is rotten company.  Now Transparency has shared that there are companies from highly rated countries that engage in corrupt practices in their cross-border activities.  They toe the line and are good corporate citizens at home, but regular bandits in other countries that they diminish.  The issue for Guyanese is how much of this could be happening here, considering the glaring weaknesses of many political participants with power.  The management of the nation’s oil wealth is the first witness that can be summoned.

At this point, we make something clear: the CPI report is not a gimmick, but a development that is much watched around the world, one that has its own weight in respected circles.  So, local verbal gimmicks relative to transparency and accountability have lost all weight when the issue is the pervasive chronic corruption that drains billions from this country. Political leaders may believe that they have glossed over, and gotten away with, the costly culture that undermines this country’s promise.  They fool themselves, for most citizens, including their own, see through the gaps between what is preached and what is practiced.

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• corruption, Editorial, Guyana, PPPC Government

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