Not ignorant, but political cormorants

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

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Hard Truths…

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News- A few Guyanese have shared with me that they cannot believe that many in Guyana’s political leadership cohort are so ignorant.  Wrong, I say.  The local leadership is not ignorant, but more possessing the skills of a cormorant.  They dive deeply for the benefit of their fishing expeditions.  It is how leaders dunk Guyanese in a sea of stupidity that has to do with their oil money.

Ignorant is accidental, could be a product of circumstances, or personal condition.  More mental than physical.  Who in Guyana, who in the world, can persuade me that the PPP leadership is ignorant and so is the PNC’s?  To keep everybody happy, I offer them a swap deal.  Impotent in the place of ignorant.  Here are some extras, deliberately obtuse, playing the fool, and comfortable in their role as political eunuchs.  There is still hope for Guyana.  For during the waning days of the once dominant Roman Empire, the eunuch Eutropius rose to become a consul, the highest post in the old Roman republic of Gaius Julius Caesar, Marcus Tullus Cicero, and Gaius Valerius Catullus.

The PPP doesn’t have corrupt men and women relative to the mind department. Utterly corrupt around the people’s money, most definitely.  But the corruption of ignorance, not at all.  Big men in the PPP pretend at stupidity.  They may not know the Exxon contract inside out, but they know enough.  And they use that to get by, and wave it around like some pompom clad cheerleader for Exxon to mislead and blind Guyanese.  Are some Guyanese living here (or anywhere) who truly believe that the members at the higher levels of the PPP brass band are ignorant of the provisions of the Natural Resource Fund?  Or, of the depth and breadth of what transparency with its millions means?  C’mon people, let’s get real.

It is not that they, decisionmakers, in the PPP Government are ignorant about what bona fide transparency is all about.  It is how they define transparency, and how they minimize the definition, for their own self-serving purposes.  Self-serving is a synonym for self-enrichment.  I firmly believe that even the severely psychically retarded would not conclude that moving a million from Point A to Point B represents transparency at its best.  And further, when the same million is again lateraled and immersed in a broad spending mechanism that such represents revealing transparency.  The broad is too thick, too blurred.  It is also too convenient a cover for the shenanigans that have been so inseparable from the spending of public monies from the first dollar. Only people who are especially inventive are able to think of such a definition of transparency, then apply it, and last defend it.

Naturally, due to its narrowness, and its 35,000 feet height, it must be defended with still more political guile.  Political guile has elements of criminal guile in its makeup.  The rottenness that run amok behind the public smoke and mirrors, public word games, must be hidden from public view, suppressed at all costs and by any means.

It is why Guyanese politicians can take a simple banana peel and use it as the floor of a dancehall. Observe them, listen to them, then interpret them.  In aggregate, it is the height of unwisdom to think of such men and women in the Guyanese political arena as fulfilling all the characteristics of what is ignorant.  They are ignorant in different way and for different matters.  But they are not ignorant when money is involved.  Money is what drives Guyanese politicians, almost without exception, to be at their dazzling best with powerful and unmatched animal cunning.  Money is what engenders the necessary skulking astuteness in many Guyanese politicians, particular those with the elected power, to be as scurrilously resourceful, as the circumstances demand.

I encourage my fellow citizens to absorb the street acumen of politicians standing at the top of the heap.  Citizens must then ask themselves if what they are seeing and hearing would not make the originator of a Ponzi scheme and any veteran con artist look like a beginner.  The greater the amount of money that is up for grabs, the slicker they are.  These men are not ignorant, do not have the luxury of lapsing into ignorance.  One crack in their armour and they fall apart.  So, they study their soft points (transparency and accountability place at the top of the totem pole) and then put putty or fasten grout in those chinks to hold things together.  I myself am astonished at the face that is being put on transparency with oil money.  It has pimples and scars all over.  But a spirited effort is still made to steer local thinking in only one direction.  That matters relating to oil money are on the up and up and, further, that the road stops where they say that it does.  Ignorance or feigned impotence?  I think that this is less than what is ignorant and more in the manner of the cormorant.  The cormorant goes to extraordinary levels for the big fish.  Oil money has powered big bacchanals.  Guyanese want it that way.  Hence, it has been so.

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

(Not ignorant, but political cormorants)

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• hard truths, local leadership, personal condition, PPP brass band, self-enrichment.

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