Comparisons

Feb 19, 2024 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard truths….

The PPP Government and its leading lights are fond of comparisons.  Comparisons with what the PNC did using the point of 2020, and what the PPP did since then and up to now, 2024.  Without a doubt, the numbers presented in various scenarios, with the context of the present teachers’ strike being one of them, provide the basis for some degree of comparison.  But it is a flawed comparison, one that leaves out a fundamental element.  Because of the deliberate omission of this most meaningful of elements, any and all comparisons by the PPP relative to what it has done, and is doing now, versus the statistics extracted from the time of the PNC, when it was in government, is built on farce, and could even be interpreted as being exemplary in deviousness.

Before proceeding, I make this point clear: the PNC (and others in that alphabet stew) is competent enough to make its own representations.  What I present and assert is that of a man in the street, one that owes no loyalty, claims no allegiance, to any of the domestic behemoths, some would say devils.  The element purposely ignored by the devious PPP leadership is that there was no oil money flowing into Guyana’s coffers during the prior government’s tenure.  Oil money, as limited as it is, and due to the auspices of the previous coalition government, is the new gamechanger, the incomparable component that makes so much possible.  For emphasis, oil is the whirring, humming, racing engine room behind all the numbers so proudly presented by PPP powers, PPP pundits, and PPP propagandists.  The PNC had no such cushion, nor backing, nor luxury during its time.  This difference alone is what renders moot any and all comparison to what the previous government did, and how much it did, as opposed to what and how much the PPP Government now delivers.

Instead of a new government to old government comparison, which is not a bona fide comparison at all, there is a more relevant and practical exercise that should be essayed.  It is what would serve the interests of the mass of the poorest in one of the richest societies anywhere on this planet.  The exercise involves an honest examination of how the billions coming into the Government of Guyana’s hands are being used and misused.

Being viewed as an expression of its self-serving or people-oriented visions.  And managed to realize leadership’s personal illegitimate ambitions.  And parceled out as corrupt or corrupting rewards.  And withheld from adversaries, And used as a weapon against perceived enemies.  And generally well used, misused, or abused.

Parsing through the billions of dollars from the oil monies withdrawn, the billions more borrowed, and where they went would reveal not so much the failure of an impotent and nonexistent PNC, now on the margins of power and the governance picture.  But more of how much the PPP Government and leadership have condemned themselves in the direction that the dollars went, and for what and to whom, and the volumes of such dollars, now usually in the billions.  The old coalition government does not feature in this at all, and what is revealing is the appalling extent of the blatant irresponsibility, the covert criminality, of the PPP with the money that is totally in its hands to dispense or deny, without limit.  As examples, teachers and pensioners certainly have more in their hands in 2024 than what they had in 2020 when the last government exited ignominiously.  Unsaid, I remind one and all, has been the great contributor and difference-maker that the billions from oil deposits have made and the billions that can now be borrowed from anybody because of the powerful and proven collateral beneath the sea.

I contend and I insist that every presentation of the PPP Government about how many more schools and kilometers of road it has built, among other things, is from the steroids of an economy that is 70% fueled by oil.  It is not a dynamo, but a nuclear reactor, and all any government in the seat of power has to do is hold on to the steering wheel.  Truth be told, considering the money that pours into Guyana’s treasury, in the most liberal definition, governance in Guyana is the equivalent of a self-driving apparatus.  Yet, even this, the PPP Government and leadership have mangled, distorted, and been devious about, rather than approaching in a spirit of balance, fairness, and what has the high potential to bring every Guyanese to the same place.  That is, one of contentment: that there is a government in place, and with leaders to match, that have done what is just by any standard.  Instead, what Guyanese have fallen foul of is a cabal of gangsters calling themselves a government.  It is why there is implacable intolerance for any degree of dissent by those who say the government’s leaders’ clothes have holes.  Plus, they smell.

To sum this up, and this specious comparison trickery engaged in by the PPP of today, and the con artists that it has for those leading the way, I have a comparison of my own to place on the public table.  Comparing what the PNC did in 2020 (or the few years before), to what the PPP is doing today is like comparing the power and reach and flexibility that Premier Cheddi Jagan had pre-independence to that of Kabaka and President LFS Burnham in post-Independence Guyana.  It is not a comparison worth the word, or the realities of the two luminosities.  There is no comparison at all.  For one, had nothing while the other, had everything.  Like before, there is that constant common denominator.  To my fellow Guyanese, I give my fellow Americans.

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• Cheddi Jagan, Government, Guyanese, illegitimate, of Kabaka and President, PPP

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