Corruption is a serial killer, could be 2025 gamechanger

Aug 17, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – The PPP Government enjoyed a holiday of several years duration where its corruption was concerned.  Not anymore.  Before, the rancor over the PNC 2020 elections shenanigans overwhelmed all other considerations.  Guyanese, especially PPP supporters, knew that there was some swindling and thievery happening in government quarters, but a benign eye ruled.  Then, there were the succession of oil developments, the heavy electricity of global attention and expensive national projects blanketing the news.  The dullness and dreariness of corruption got shoved to the inside pages of the media, and to the back of the consciousness of citizens.  All governments steal.  The ones in the Roman Catholic system in Vatican City, another under a Muslim theocracy in Teheran, and that big one in New Delhi that is so much about dharma and karma are no exceptions.  If where God supposedly has so much influence corruption still has life, then what about where godlessness reigns supreme.  There is PPP Guyana.

Thinking of this, I interpreted corruption presence and corruption power in Guyana in two ways.  When it is negligible and somewhat invisible, the people are inaudible, even manageable.  By negligible, I mean that everyone knows that corruption is there, but it is more of a common cold and not a lethal cancer.  The people shake their heads (“dem bannas dis baad…”).  Some of the people smirk (“de PNCEE used to teef tuh”).  And when the people-PPP backers, PNC outsiders, and the mixed bag of those President Ali calls naysayers and troublemakers-manage to get by the demands of daily living, a slippery peace and tranquility prevail.

The concern is when corruption becomes such a monstrous beast that it can neither be ignored nor covered up nor condoned any longer.  When corruption has reached that chronic condition (critical mass state), then it is more than a concern: corruption is a crisis that threatens a catastrophe.  I must commend the PPP Government for contributing to its own self-destruction.

For when PPP loyalists speak alarmingly, angrily, and despondently about corruption, then Guyanese know what the world knows.  PPP Government corruption is bad beyond evaluation, beyond mention, maybe even reconciliation.  Nothing and all the books that I can write could ever capture, contain, and convey the culture of corruption that has seized Guyanese by their necks and suffocates the life out of them.  Mention the tender board and revulsion comes.  Say the procurement commission and vomiting reflux is triggered.  Talk about awards and the performance of some contractors and overseeing engineers and it is time for the urinal or number two.

Who can pretend not to see, not to care?  To round matters off, when the honourable men and women in Guyana are challenged to say something straight about what is going on, Guyanese get a stone if they are lucky, a snake, if they are not.  One honourable citizen reacts by hissing and spitting in venomous serpentine fashion.  Matters are made worse, because knowing nods.  Self-destruction in action again. Like another babbler and bluffer, the responses to rampant corruption are all coils and menaces, just like one of those shiny and speckled creatures.  There is a degree of transparency in them, for the more they deny, the more they damage and damn themselves.  In a nutshell, PPP corruption is so thick that the air in Guyana is thicker than that over Beijing, Bombay, and Baku combined.  Because of PPP corruption thickness and darkness, Guyanese can’t see; Guyanese sinuses flare; Guyanese stomachs sicken.  The trouble for the PPP is that those are not only PNC and AFC believers.  Those are increasing numbers of PPP devotees who have had it up to their eyeballs with the corruption of their government.

They lament PPP Government corruption on Liberty Avenue, they scream about it on Independence Boulevard.  From Punt Trench Dam to Bella-dam to the sea dam to the back dam, the refrain is loud and clear and commanding.  Damn them.  Damn the PPP Government and its thieving.  Damn the rogues and reprobates that steal and squander and celebrate, while life is so difficult for the ordinary man and woman and their children.

PPP Government corruption has groundings, long transformed into a groundswell, and has now swollen into what smothers citizens with its stench, sickness.  It is said that all politics is local.  When the pinch is felt by the individual, it is local.  When the pain pierces families, then it is localized.  Matters heighten to heated intensity, when the impacts are personal, i.e., the regular mass of left behind people squeezed, the left out made into losers when the world is telling them that they are the biggest winners.  The losers see the winners and they are not of PNC stripes.  They check out who are the arrogant, swaggering bigshots, and they are not AFC operators.  The distressed don’t have to vote for them.  Guaranteed incentives may be too late to get them to come out come 2025.  Corruption is the contributor.  Corruption could be the difference maker.  PPP Government corruption looks like the game changer.  Now, if only enormously unhappy Guyanese had an alternative in 2025.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• corruption, gamechanger, killer, PPP, supporters

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