Corruption-faddah and muddah – can’t be

Jul 01, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths column…

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – Guyanese think they know corruption, because they see its huge footprints across this country.  What they don’t know, didn’t think could happen, that is actually happening.  And how!  The pundits and propagandists say look at how bright and beautiful things are.  We know those who look like that, only for pervasive sicknesses flourishing inside.

Some shrug, smile, as if nothing occurred.  For many in the PPP Government, and those who support mindlessly, fanatically, it is much ado about nothing.  It works until such time that the diseased nature of the body cannot be denied any longer, nor hidden anymore.  This is where Guyana and Guyanese are, the government is, and its people at the heights know it.  They fear.  Not just losing elections.  They fear having to account for all their high-level arrangements, their topnotch maneuvers, and more.  All must remember that the best laid plans of mice and men often come to naught.

Guyana is a big place and a small place.  Despite being 83,000 square miles, it just as well might have been 83 square feet across and up and down.  A man’s head could be in one village, and his feet extend into the next.  Good works are slow to be recognized; but stink and dutty wuk spread like wildfire.  When such involves politicians and their people, radioactivity spirals.  Those in the PPP Government who want to snuff corruption out, can’t.  Those in the PPP Government who desire to dilute it, make it go away, can’t.  Those in the PPP Government, from top to toe, who wish that Guyanese would turn their faces, and pretend that corruption is a PNC practice, and Burnham badness, discover that it is a losing battle, as citizens refuse to look the other way.  Even if they do, with faces turned and nostrils sealed, they run into the same plague: more corruption.  It is now industrial size and industrial strength.  Move over, Exxon.  Take a backseat, gold.

Back in the bad ole days of Burnham (remember he, Burnham de baad maan?), what he did was miniscule compared to what is going on today.  One example from his time, was that he would offer jobs to overseas-based Guyanese loyalists, who would come and serve.  Some stole. Some served.  Most went back, when either sentiment or conditions dried up.  Compare that to today.  Under the PPP of oil and oil funds, and the loans made possible by oil collateral, those in charge are not satisfied with local cronies and cabals to be active participants in siphoning off the people’s wealth.  Fixed contracts.  Fixed oversight.  Fixed practices, from high to low.  So now, there are those in the PPP (and they are not the smaller bangamary variety) import friends and family to engage in the fun.  Ah, the diaspora unit, and the diaspora dregs that comeback and do deh duttiness.   The cottage industry under Burnham has scaled up to a national crime industry under today’s PPP.

I can manage to coexist with friends and family repatriated and handed billions in contracts to deliver in some fashion what they never knew existed.  To elaborate, family such as cousins-in-law, or some ne’er do well, deh baad brother-in-law that is recruited for corrupt purposes.  But one’s mother and father?  Hell, NO!  A mother-in-law and father-in-law, no and no again.  There are limits to my understanding and appreciating that human nature can be irrepressible.  But one should never (never) involve their parents or spouse’s parents in skullduggery and tomfoolery aka criminal activity.  On this one issue, this one instance, there is certainty that the honorable attorney general would agree wholeheartedly with me.  Bhai Bharrat, too.

To Drs. Nandlall and Jagdeo, I say this (humbly, of course): even the Mafia don’t stoop so low as to involve their old folks, be they of bloodline or by law), as aiders and abettors in criminal activities.  Yet, this is what is going on in Guyana when millions are up for grabs.  To repeat: I can pretend ignorance, when a man mek he haan fass.  Or get he fren and far famlee fuh do wrang ting.  But I draw the line when men and women in the PPP Government, drag in mama and papa to expand their corruption.  I do some PPP folks an injustice, when I write in the plural.  The singular is most applicable.  This is how far and deep, Guyana and governance and leadership has decayed today.  I cannot fathom how heroic PPP apologists and PR defenders live with themselves.  They die by their own hand, when they condone crimes of this unnatural nature.  Conscience sold for a penny; character sacrificed for those who rope in their mothers and fathers into a life of crime.  Elder abuse, writ large, I think.  In for millions, in for billions.  Now that’s transparency.

(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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• Burnham, corruption, GHK Lall, PNC, PPP Government

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