Govt. and corruption

Dec 31, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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(Kaieteur News) – The reaction from the PPP Government was immediate and sharp.  Objection!  Objection to the 2025 US International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) on Guyana.  Objection to the INCSR about pervasive corruption.  Paralyzing corruption.  Forget about corruption with national tenders and procurement.  The INCSR is about sprawling corruption ensnaring high people and sabotaging this country’s efforts to stem the narcotics traffic, manage the money laundering paradise that Guyana has become.  The PPP Government is objecting.  What else is left for it to do, other than brazenly deny the undeniable?

Only recently, it was the unmistakable figure of Excellency Irfaan Ali who proclaimed the USA a special friend.  A true friend doesn’t turn a blind eye to what is destroying a good friend.  Nor what is destroying the friendship also.  It would take a friend of unbelievable treachery (particularly a special one) to manufacture all that is incorporated into that damning 2025 INCSR on Guyana’s efforts, or lack thereof, re narcotics and dark money.  Though the US itself has a reputation for being destructive when such suits its visions, Guyanese don’t need any US INCSR to inform them of what they live with, see unfold in spurts and showers in their midst.

Would that seizure of over four tons of the hard stuff in the interior ever had made the news, if left to Guyanese minds and hands alone?  I shouldn’t need to answer.  Go on, mister; keep on objecting.  Lame objections.  Hollow objections.  Comical ones, too.  Corruption is a cancer and a killer in Guyana, and the PPPC knows it.  But there is the PPPC Government raging against it.  The C in PPPC stands for corruption.  But the government is furious.  Furious over what, fabrications and supposed exaggerations?  Or furious over being found out and flayed before the world?  The Europeans know so, for they are the ones having to do honest work, and catching those fat consignments of drugs from Guyana every now and again.  Just think of how many more huge consignments elude official nets.  The local ones are part of the problem, the hemorrhage.  The foreign ones are forced to toil harder, and with an eye on its supposed national partner.  If the Guyana Government is angry- more like putting on a good performance on being so- just think of how much angrier the Yanks are.  It is American youth and American systems that pay an ongoing and draining price from the death-dealing products that have Guyana stamped on their packages.  I have a problem with the demand side, but that will always win, and with slapdash and subservient countries like Guyana booted about at will.

The drugs might be recreational and whatnot, but the money laundering swarm is another matter altogether.  I recall from over a quarter century ago, when the Americans started to tighten their efforts against money laundering.  Considering the money spent, the manpower recruited, and the management systems thrown at anti-money laundering (AML), I said to myself that this is as serious as pneumonia.  If anything, the scope and intensity of America’s AML efforts keep expanding and probing, deepening and calling out.  Note some former foreign big names that have been taken aim at, with a common condition: corruption.  Money laundering is an almost automatic aspect of their once presidential or ministerial greatness.  I have a warning to share with my Guyanese brothers in the PPP Government: friends have their utility.  But only to a point.  The Americans know who is corrupt here, and the higher they are, the more prominent they are on the white people’s radar, and in their thinking.  Nothing, nobody, remains hidden.

Another caution may also be helpful.  The illicit narcotics business is one thing, and though bad enough, don’t tamper with the money network setup largely by the Americans, with able assistance from the Europeans.  Undermine, and there’s usually hell to pay.  Special friendship or whatever, the Americans have manifested a certain doggedness when their anxieties are substantial.  It is where they are with Guyana.  Look at the fallen angels in the PPP Government’s firmament.  Customs, and that is a whale of an institution.  Law enforcement and what is that, if not one big building after another with big people and their big ideas on how to make billions.  There is road traffic and those other kinds of traffic that the INCSR identified.  Try drugs and money laundering, and the corruption traffic that makes both so flourishing.  And self-enriching also.

Here is a sidebar that is not a laughing matter.  In a big meeting here with senior officers of the law and civilians from private business, there was an unbelievable spectacle.  Two of the very senior men were competing openly for command of a certain area.  Everybody else in that conference room knew that it was for the captaincy of one of the more lucrative drug spots in this country.  Seniors in the open and uncaring; that should convey how bad the bad business is here.  This can’t be a country.  Guyana is a crime syndicate, and there are the right godfathers presiding over it.  My final hand is reserved for the baleful stars in the mighty PPP Government.  Those who protest the loudest often have the weakest substance, stand on the slipperiest slope.  The PPP may consider itself mighty in Guyana, and not without justification.  There is a problem, Georgetown.  The Americans are mightier.

(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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• corruption, GHK Lall, INCSR, PPPC

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