Politicians casual, tentative relationship with truth

Sep 20, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Corruption and truth are sworn, generational enemies. Corruption flourishes when truth is pushed into the farthest corner and given no freedom to take its rightful place before men. All Guyana needs to know, must be told, what happened to the Kaieteur and Canje oil blocks. The blocks loaded with production potential were there, one moment in Guyana’s hands, then they were gone. For next to nothing, to those who were strangers to the oil business, and under the cover of darkness when Guyanese were distracted. National elections provided the perfect cover for what has every resemblance to political skullduggery of the highest order. This was what the PPPC Government seemingly engaged in during the closing days of its 2015 administration, as the record confirms.

The Kaieteur and Canje oil blocks are gone, and what PPPC Government officials have shared since then opens them to ridicule and suspicions about the strength of their relationship with truth. One former PPPC Government minister insisted that he acted on the advice of the lawyers. On that basis, and with the fullest confidence, he made his recommendations to President Ramotar to go through with the deal. The issue is whether it was honest dealing, or cunning wheeling and dealing with the lucrative assets of this country. The latter has been a consistent feature of one PPPC Government after another. Strangely, the architect of the secret sale of the two oil blocks has developed some form of amnesia. He remembers what he wishes to remember, and memory lapses have imprisoned him in solitary confinement: there has been mostly silence from him. Two of the nation’s rich oil blocks disposed of in circumstances riddled with mysteries, and all that the people who own the blocks get is a former minister referring the issue to the then president, who himself has admitted to a serious information deficit about what happened. Truth in its natural and unrestrained expressiveness, or truth condemned to the chopping block, is what has troubled citizens since news of the sale of the Kaieteur and Canje oil blocks came to light. Or, to take the matter to another level, and probably where it is most appropriate, a nontransparent government and its secretive people trapped in a puzzle of their own making, but which is not a puzzle to anyone with basic intelligence.

It is baffling that the APNU+AFC Coalition Government did not see it fit to investigate what really went on with those two oil blocks. Like the PPPC Government, the Coalition also had its own priorities, which pushed the interests of Guyanese somewhere down the line, where honest and serious things did not enjoy much premium. In a country learning about oil, slowly growing in understanding of the gifts that it has been given, different governments failed Guyanese. They have either withheld the full truth from citizens or shaved the truths that were placed before the public. When truth is the scarcest of commodities, then corruption becomes the government of the day. To that point, no one in any government, PPPC or APNU+AFC Coalition, could give a straight and full account of what were the driving forces behind the sale of the Kaieteur and Canje oil blocks.

When the issue of the two blocks were put before Vice President Jagdeo, he promised a deep investigation to get to the bottom of this mystery sale and clear the air, once and for all. He didn’t have much to offer for a time, despite being reminded that the issue remained unanswered. When Jagdeo did share what happened, it was a combination of the incredible, the outrageous, and the comically tragic: no laws were broken. A sale to shadowy people with no oil experience, a dent to Guyana’s treasury, the quick flipping of the two blocks for real money and no laws were broken. When truth is tortured like this, obscured like this, then something becomes obvious. What politicians say is what goes, what they do is justified by any frivolous rationales, and there matters usually die. Government and politicians develop a casual and tentative association with truth, one that becomes their defining characteristic. In a country, a government, that is ruptured by deceptions, truth dies daily.

corruption, darkness, Editorial, generational, Guyana’s

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Politicians casual, tentative relationship with truth

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