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PPPC Govt. operating like a secret society
Editorial…
Kaieteur News- It is sickening and embarrassing to present the contradictory and hypocritical postures of the PPPC Government. Promises are made at the highest political levels, orders emerge from the government’s bureaucracy, again at the top levels, and Guyanese still remain in states of waiting and ignorance. The abnormal is now normal.
One glaring example of this new normal involves the US$7.3B audit of the expenses of ExxonMobil for 2018-20. The final report should have been with citizens long ago, but is not. The secrecy surrounding the US$7.3B audit report is but one of contradictions that would humiliate any head of state committed to serving the people with transparency and accounting on how the country’s business is conducted. Guyana’s President Ali is unfazed, content to reside in his own world, while the world around him unravels, ridicules his leadership.
It is expected that when a leading public servant, one with the title of Commissioner General of the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) issues an order, that that final audit report will be followed through forthwith. Four months after the GRA head gave that go ahead for the release of the report, it remains a standing mystery, almost a forbidden document. To compound this matter, the Minister of Natural Resources, also promised that the audit report compiled by the local consortium VHE Consulting would be in public hands. Like the GRA boss, the minister assured that the release will be done within a week. Guyanese are still waiting four months later.
This triggers a few questions. What could be responsible for the delay on VHE’s part? Who is behind the tying of VHE’s hands may be the more proper question? It is already public knowledge that the quality of the audit, the areas covered by the local audit consortium leaves much to be desired, so what other well-tailored deficits could there be? And, so we blend all of this into one question: is the PPPC Government really about its much-parroted transparency, or is it at the core operating like a secret society?
Secret societies are characterized by webs of deception, webs that seek to deflect accountability, webs that try very hard to camouflage reality. If anything, the record of the PPPC Government has been a compilation of all three webs. There was the web surrounding the mystery of the initial US$214M in audit findings of the British firm, IHS Market, that dropped all the way to US$3M. From that timebomb, the usually commanding political presences in Guyana rushed to distance themselves. A willing scapegoat tethered deep inside the Ministry of Natural Resources was found to take what we believe was a bum rap. He was all patriotic smiles, maybe fooling himself that he did his duty to his country. Was it really fierce duty on behalf of country?” Or, more like dubious duty to a government led by a political party that is now seen for what it is, a secret society?
Two oil audits involving billions of US dollars, and the public is left to cut through the mysteries and secrecies. If those were all, Guyanese may have been tempted to be understanding, patient, and adopt a wait-and-see attitude. But there is something else that lines up even more rancidly and ominously, which strengthens the conviction that the PPPC Government is a secret society, and most pleased that its concealments flourish with age. Access to information represents rotted egg on the face of government leaders, then the entire government.
In 2011, the Access to Information law came into effect. Now consider the following longstanding realities. For all intents and purposes, access to information is inaccessible, the Office of the Commissioner of Information is in no man’s land, and the Commissioner of Information is in recess, a state of perpetual wintry hibernation. In the vocabulary of sports, the Office of the Commissioner of Information has graduated to that of spinner and slider. Like the Ministry of Natural Resources’ scapegoat (US$214M audit findings) and like the VHE’s sloth in following the GRA’s order, the inaccessibility to information from that taxpayer funded office, confirms that the PPPC Government is a secret society in total lockdown mode. All fingers, all eyes, focus in one political leadership direction.
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