Big fish corruption

Feb 19, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths…

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News- Corruption in Guyana is a big boy’s game, and a rich man’s playground.  According to Transparency International, political and business elites have hijacked Guyana via the machinery of corruption that now rampages across Guyana.  High political places, rich private sector places, are the spaces that encompass the elites of which Transparency reported so accurately.  Corruption is everywhere and infects most of the principals in the political and private sectors.  Translation: the length and breadth and strength of the local elites

The corrupt elites are mostly high-profile presences in Guyana’s political and business aristocracies.  Oftentimes, it is a tricky task to identify where politics ends and business begins, so intimately entangled the two sectors are.  The smarter ones in the corrupt political set have perfected a slew of methods to escape detection, as they establish businesses to capitalize on profit opportunities.  Part of the corruption of the political elite is the unfair use of the power in its hands, for unfair advantage.  Rich and extravagant advantage for themselves and cronies.  One way is through the use of friends, families, and other fronts that are designed to shield their involvement in corrupt practices.  It is how the system is gamed, how the corruption multiplies.  This year’s record national budget, and those of the last three years, also record, represent a compelling portrait of how corruption is papered over in official jargon, and swallowed up in large numbers.  It is the Catch-22 for the PPP Government: the budget must be used as the conduit through which to reward their business cronies (alongside setting up businesses for their own profits) from immense set asides.  The size of the dollars is what gives the goose away.  The national budget (plus supps) is the overarching system that devolves downwards and across to the private sector, with the crooked bidding and awarding apparatuses all in place to perform accordingly.

I would extend Transparency’s official narrative on political and business corruption at the elite level to a, perhaps, unlooked and unexamined area.  It has to do with the minimum wage.  The question is how do Guyanese minimum wage earners live on GY$2,000 per day?  This is stunning for the private sector, when the public service’s minimum wage is approximately 50% higher.  The fact that the minimum wage has stagnated at $60,000 plus since 2022 is nothing but a revulsion, when cost-of-living is killing the rank and file of Guyana, and those just above them on the local economic ladder.  Meanwhile, profits for the private sector elite skyrockets.  I chalk what I call the minimum wage freeze to the incestuous relationship between the corrupt political and private sector elites.  The latter has such a grip on the former that the minimum wage has stayed frozen for years, despite a spiraling, punishing cost-of-living environment.  These earners cannot buy food, take proper care of their families, but the political and private sector elites are so corrupt and so callous that they can literally conspire to starve this segment of Guyanese.  What could be more instructive of who is corrupt and how nefarious corruption is than this minimum wage issue now existing in a three-year coma?

To raise the minimum wage would dilute private sector profit margin.  To raise the issue with the private sector elite would place the political elite in the enemy encampment.  So, the smallest of the small Guyanese worker is cheated.  He or she is conned by the people believed to have their best interests at heart, and to whom the small man has been consistently loyal.  Words like ‘cheated’ and ‘conned’ are part of the soul of corrupt activity and a corrupt culture.  It is the kind of culture that has passed the state of a cancer.  Corruption in Guyana is now a crime that kills the national coffers first, then the spirit of the segments of the local population left to fend for themselves.  One last example has its own ugly story to tell.  When the controlling political elite shrinks from dealing with debilitating noise nuisance across Guyanese communities living with constantly rolling thunder in their ears, then that emphasizes the reach of the private sector.  And, how the political elite is in bed with it.

These are the types of situations that reconfirm what I said about the national criminal enterprise that holds so much sway over Guyana today.  I wrote of this vast criminal enterprise first, to which the business elite belongs.  Transparency came second when it spoke in terms of corrupt political and business elites holding Guyana captive.  I do the same now to make it three in a row. The political and private sector elites are now recognized far and wide across Guyana as the major participants in the corruption carnival; a carnival of unprecedented greed and crookedness.  I make another point: though the opposition may not be a powerful or influential presence in the Guyana political elite of today, it is not an outsider, or an uninvolved element.  By default, therefore, the government is recognized as the major presence in Transparency’s mention of a political elite and how enmeshed it is with business biggies in the corruptions that squeeze life out of country and poor citizens.

(Big fish corruption)

(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 in Guyana, hard truths, political and business aristocracies, transparency international

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