Govt. corruption past cancerous

Aug 13, 2025 Editorial, Features / Columnists

Kaieteur News – Claims of corruption, a corruption culture, and actual corruption now wash over the PPPC Government with a vengeance. All the thieveries and perversities now hang like a sword over the heads of leaders and favored insiders.

The sense of corruption in the government is now so overwhelming that it chokes in the feeble efforts at pretending that the opposite is true, that the government’s hands are clean. Government sycophants are now ashamed to say anything, knowing that they inflame public opinion, only make matters worse. The corruption that the government created is now like a knee on the necks of its own, squeezing the life out of them.

It is nauseating how often the names of top-ranking officials in the PPPC Government are called in some corruption context. For the most part, neither elected officials nor the ones that they select to support their work are spared. Often, there’s the overpowering sense that national governance has deteriorated to the machinations of a gang of thieves. The skullduggeries are most pronounced in procurement for public works.

The last five years indicate one record budget after another, with a threshold crossed this year, that of a national budget for over a trillion dollars. In lockstep, some awards of the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board resemble the work of sometimes crude, sometimes sneaky, undercover criminal gang. Hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts are approved in the tender review and evaluation process, and news seeps into public consciousness of who the winners are, who they are connected to. It is a small circle that has PPPC Government family and friends and their favored stitched into it.

When dubious awards for hundreds of millions (sometimes, billions) in taxpayers dollars become the norm, with those from the regular circle benefiting, there is little that government apologists can offer as credible rebuttals. There is a Public Procurement Commission that has a mandate to oversee and probe how taxpayer funds are used, but it has been content to be a sleeping dog. Waking or sleeping, this group should have been fodder for any local pound, if there was one still in existence. The $865M Belle View pump station, the GPL-InterEnergy electricity consulting agreement for US$630,000 a month, and the US$2B Wales Gas-to-energy are three of the more recent instances of the questions and controversies that infest PPPC Government activities on behalf of citizens.

It seems that wherever millions are involved, there has to be some piece carved out to satisfy the corrupt instincts of the people in the government that cannot be tamed, that few can resist. Bigger budgets have meant that bigger opportunities for stealing on a scale, like never seen before, become readily available. The expectation is that those close to the public trough will partake, so that the sharing and spreading of the wealth among the corrupt in the PPP at the national and regional levels goes from strength to strength. The corruptions given extended life under the mantra of national development priorities, as boosted by bigger and bigger yearly budgets, have been an addict’s dream come true.

The key to the PPPC Government’s success in initiating and continuing with the rampant levels of corruption is having the right loyalists in the right places. Men and women know what is demanded of them, and so they raid the treasury, through inflated contracts, shoddy evaluations, and a wink-and-nod standard of supervision and signoff. They know that the government will defend them, regardless of the moronic utterances that have to come out of the mouths of party and government seniors. Due to the rolling, incestuous nature of corruption in the government, seniors must defend juniors, even when they know they are making utter fools of themselves. The handpicked juniors from the tainted PPP circle do the dirty deeds, confident that the seniors will cover for them, by slipping away or cursing out those who push to get to the bottom of the latest episode of official banditry. Now that corruption flourishes so openly under the PPPC Government, Guyanese don’t speak of it as a cancer or crime. Corruption is now the PPPC Government’s religion, corruption is the god that it worships. Its own self-sanctioning.

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Cancerous, corruption, Govt. corruption, PPPC Government

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