All parties believe in “family, friends, and favourites” – a culture entrenched by Burnham and PNC

Aug 25, 2025 Letters

Dear Editor

All the Opposition parties have repeated the statement that the ruling party operates mainly by preference to “family, friends, and favourites.” The implication is that decisions must be made by some independent, impartial, objective criteria that guarantees fairness in standard operating procedures. Such procedures must be applicable to all without regard to subjectivity such as race, religion, national origin, gender, party, or whether you are form a rural, riverain, or interior region.

The truth is this principle is actually in operation now most of the time. All scholarships for GOAL, UG, tertiary education are done fairly across the board. House lots are given out if you register and wait in line. Education and housing are the biggest dreams of anyone and these are done fairly across the board. Access to medical services is fair across the board and access is increasing as the Government has built the most hospitals and clinics in the history of our country. Equity has largely been embedded in how this Government carries out policy. We need the same for contracts.

But how did we get to the practice of “family, friends, and favourites?” In the burnhamist pre-1992 era, the PNC had declared itself supreme to the Constitution in its doctrine of “paramountcy of the party.” Everything became emasculated in the PNC’s 28 years of rigged elections and dictatorship. Our political and social culture became deformed in a “dog-eat-dog” mentality in which access to “friends” became important to get food or anything. The PNC flag flew over the Courts. Those were the years where if you didn’t know a PNC comrade to put in a word for you, you will get nowhere. So, our young people now need to know the history of how “friends, family and favourites” came into being. The PNC wrote the Manuals for that. Those of us who lived through that era, snicker when we hear the PNC and the new “baby” parties complain about that as they try to generate support from the electorate.

The fact is that people get involved in politics hoping to get positions or benefits as a friend or family member of the ruling Government and hope to be one of the favourites. That’s how politics works. Our various Commissions, the Ombudsman’s Office, Courts, and similar institutions, must function well in their watchdog roles. The Procurement Commissions, Public Accounts Committees, etc. must function well in their watchdog roles, and must be held accountable for doing their job well.

At the GECOM level, the PNC Commissioners do a good job of making noise about things there. What I find in Guyana is that most people are not against corruption as a principle, it is that they are jealous they are not the ones who are in the in-group of friends, family, and favourites getting the premium soup. When they are in the opposition, they know what is right, moral, honest and good, and they wax eloquent criticizing the other side. When they get into Government, they do the exact same as the previous Government. The promised “change” becomes the “exchange.” And then the next election we fight to change the people who said they were the “change,” as happened in 2020.

Whenever someone gets into trouble, they look to see who is a “friend, family, or favourite” in the governmental system who can bail them out. And they are willing to pay money to get off from a crime, or to get a benefit. That is corruption. We the people fuel corruption. Inefficiencies across all of the Government ministries fuel corruption as we are willing to pay to speed up things. Successive governments have not saved us from that. The PPP is afraid to jack up the ministries for fear of being accused of discrimination, so we have to “pay to play.” I have not seen any manifestos to reform NIS and tackling the robbery of workers denied benefits because of poor NIS records. Some people wish they can have a family, friend or favourite to help them out with their NIS problem. Politics has never been about saints – v- sinners. “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” In politics, we usually choose the lesser evil!

Sincerely,
Dr. Jerry Jailall
Civil Society Advocate

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