Poor pay feeds corruption – start over

May 02, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

---

Hard Truths…

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News- I am surprised that even the United States makes the point that it does with underpaid public servants and its relationship to corruption.  Because the police and SOCU are underpaid, some of their people weaken a whole range of law enforcement efforts.  I agree, but only to a point.  In doing so, I recognize where the US is going with its position about underpayment, but also make my own point.  The US knows better.  Because that’s only half of the drug story.  And what a story it is, vast for a start, and more richly rewarding than working in, well, almost all other industries.  I think that even fabulously paid Wall Streeters have competition from the opulent drug business.

I endorse that low pay has its weight, and all that it does to morale and performance in any business.  Unlike most other businesses, the business of policing has, I shall say, its alternative sources of income.  A little moonlighting for a master drug dealer during the daylight hours has its paybacks.  How much pay will make a difference?  Double?  Tripling?  Whatever the multiple, the global deep-pocketed drug industry has the bankroll to outlast, outmatch, and out-pay that number.  Reality, I submit.  Any arguments, anyone?

Now, for some parallels snatched straight from real life to support my reasoning about the limits of increased pay.  I limit myself to the last 10 years; a small window, but one with big insights.  The first parallel.  The APNU+AFC Coalition took over the reins of government in May 2015.  It gave itself a nice, hefty 50% raise in quick time.  In less time, a rain of protest erupted from its own supporters in the services left to manage with their paltry pay packets.  The Coalition’s master spokesman then stepped forward under the hot lights and made his case for the increase in pay.  It was to incentivize sufficiently the then government’s members of parliament (and others), so that they would be better equipped to resist the lures of corruption.  And, not have to get bogged down by other jobs that devour their time.  Thus, their governance duties enjoy serious priority from them and actually get done.  Now, far be it from me to be the man in the black hat, and point to the corruptions that bedevilled the Coalition’s time in office.  But the returning PPP had Christmas and Easter in one, as the litany of malfeasances with land and dollar extractions was broadcast.  I sum this one up: of what good, and how far did that fat pay raise for those supposedly underpaid MPs and others go in helping some of them to remain untouched by the corruption sicknesses that haunt Guyana?

 

Parallel number two shifts the spotlight to the present PPP Government.  It is the same one that is always howling about how corrupt the PNC was.  Follow the rollcall of ministers, and quite a number of them collect the equivalent of close to two million dollars as their total pay and allowance envelope.  A corruption-proof packet, if anybody asked me.  Nobody has.  Now, I ask the Guyanese people to consider what follows.  How many in that monthly million-dollar rewarded gang in the PPP Government don’t have some trace or swath of unexplained wealth sticking to their skin like some outbreak of eczema?  Perhaps, most of them have rich ancestors (or relations) who left them countless inheritances.  To my delight, I don’t.  By way of a swift aside, note that I made it my duty today to exclude those three-million-dollar-a-month Guyanese, some of whose names have pride of place in certain kinds of conversations.  For emphasis, some of those highly paid high fliers, not all of them.

Glancing over to the public service, Guyanese never stop marvelling at the mansions of some who work in Customs.  And law enforcement.  And drug management.  For sure, they can rightly complain about being underpaid, but I nod towards Guyana’s minimum wage workers.  Not many of them can afford to buy a house for themselves, much less for their mother, grandmother, and cousins twice removed.  My point is that if there are any Guyanese who can lament about their pay, it would be those in the private sector, whose pay is around US$300 a month.  They may steal a toilet tank from time to time, but not a bank.

Though poor pay definitely has its role, the US is giving priority to the low-hanging fruit- police and other public service personnel.  When the kingpins are sent running, and their businesses are disrupted, then the little clerks and corporals (and their senior controllers) soon find themselves out of business.  In other words, no head, no tail.  Another consideration for local intelligentsia: no disrespect, but who’s going to entrust a billion dollars of coke to a pauper?  The problem with the kingpins is that they are virtually inseparable from the PPP Government.  The US has been up in arms for a long time that asset seizure features so scantily in the current government’s mix of measures against the drug trade.  Will somebody get real over there in Washington?  For that would be the equivalent of consenting to the seizure of one’s own assets.  Take the bad people holdings, and many in the PPP Government would be left holding an empty bag.  Such are the links and quid pro quos in operation in narcotics Guyana.

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

---

---