Corruption making a comeback – for the better

Jun 27, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths column

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – Chronic corruption in government dealings has made a comeback, and it’s for the better. Yes, that was read right: corruption is back and it is better. For the first time, Guyanese are paying attention to corruption, because it hits them where it hurts. In the mouth. Then in the belly and the rest of the body. Last, in the psyche. Frankly, I like this kind of corruption for several brutal reasons. What it does to the political fraudsters in the PPP Government. The lengths that it drives the people. And when it could make a material difference, given the individual and family indignities that it has wreaked.

The brainier ones in the PPP corruption machinery gambled that the old traditions of tribal loyalty will trump all considerations. They hustled and stole on the belief that the responses of Guyanese-with an emphasis on their own folks-would be unchanged. Guvments duz always teef, dah is aaal dem kno fuh duh. Or, when confronted with how bad the PPP is in the corruption arena, with the oil and loan money flooding into Guyana’s coffers and budgets (and projects), the stock reaction of the diehards has always been: de PNC teef tuh, wen dem bin deh in powah. Suh wah? Well, that was once upon a time and for a long season. But as that evergreen Guyanese hit reassured everyone: dis time nah lang time.

Lang time was when the stealing and deceiving were not as rampant, when citizens could afford to view corruption as an abstraction. For sure, there is corruption out there in the realms of government, but so is Mars somewhere out there in the universe. To say in a different way, when corruption didn’t present much of a bother to the ordinary Guyanese man and woman, the PPP (and PNC) thieves could take the risk of helping themselves, knowing full well that they could and would get away with murder. They did up to this point, and in more ways than one. I think that PPP scoundrels have become so versatile at stealing that there are reports of some even recruiting their elderly in-laws to be bagmen and bag ladies for them. How low can one get? How far is the bottom? Is there a bottom where corruption under the PPP is concerned? Billion-dollar corruptions. Serial corruptions. Pathological and cancerous corruptions. PPP corruptions are so bad, that if those were to be sent to a mortuary for treatment, they would have to be buried without the benefit of embalming. This is what has Guyanese hopping mad; this being taken for granted, and then being made into big fools. I think that the PPP so overdid it on corruption that it not only lost some of the troops; it turned them against the robbers and rogues who now hold the dominant hand in Cheddi Jagan’s working-class party.

The problem for the PPP is that its corruption is so universal that it is also local. The working-class man, the distressed woman, who struggle to feed their children, care for their aged parents, watch the party’s fat cats in their communities and how well those families and friends are doing. The ordinary people get a clear understanding of how their oil money is being siphoned off, into whose pockets it is going. It is not into their pockets. Nor is it in the direction of old and new PNC gamesters. When a comrade is hungry and he sees his fellow comrades living lavishly, then it is inevitable that he or she will get blazingly angry. The PPP bad boys and big boys only have themselves to blame. Blaming the PNC can’t help them this time. That would the equivalent of blaming Nicolas Maduro for corruption in Guyana, so farfetched it would be.

I repeatedly reminded the PPP intelligentsia (and gangsters [which might be one and the same]) of that old saying from the old people: live a little, live long. It was long before health diets became fashionable. Who in the PPP had time to listen to a Yankee transplant, one often held as a spook? Simply put, the PPP gorged itself into obesity, and now has lost its agility to evade what is dumped on the heads of its bright stars and lesser ones in the corruption cupboard. Why, even the Americans couldn’t take it anymore, which is why the sanctions weapon had to be hauled out. If this is so for Americans who are distant and rich, what about those Guyanese who are here and poor and staring at the bloated bandits in their hoods now making campaign rally speeches?

All roads terminate on September 1. It is the PPP’s 9/11. Guyanese get to say how much corruption matters. There’s that lean and hungry look. It should make them mean and dangerous.

(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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• Chronic corruption, GHK Lall, Guyana Elections, PPP corruption

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