Dear Editor,
The comments below the online version of my last letter printed in Stabroek News on December 17 (under the caption “Assurances by Minister Edghill over airport project”) have come to my attention and I thankfully respond to them. They give me a chance as a commentator to account for my actions.
First, it is very true that after twenty-three years of the PPP, the coalition was to me a kind of relief. Why? I was one of the persons in the WPA who, after the 1992 general elections which brought the PPP back into office and sparked an urban uprising, drafted in television advertisements appealing to the people to support the elected government. It included the words, “Fight with development plans in hand.” Mr. Ravi Dev will remember those words, as he somehow saw them as some kind of threat. The passing of Dr. Jagan brought a few changes and eventually gave us President Jagdeo of whom I had remarked,” Give the young man a chance.”
Fast forward to the era of Mr. Bharrat Jagdeo the former finance minister who it later leaked out had ordered the repression of a Commonwealth study that had raised the levels of pay of public servants closer to those prevailing in the private sector. This improvement had been a condition of the debt forgiveness given by the creditor nations, including Trinidad and Tobago, and the Caribbean Credit Facility.
Apart from things not relevant to the subject of this letter, financial irregularities began to surface and attracted the attention mainly of Mr. Christopher Ram and Raymond Gaskin, who were well located to obtain information. My own criticism as I recall before the armed pandemic following the jailbreak in 2002 were mainly concentrated on the Procurement arrangements through which contracts were awarded and new wealth was redistributed. All decision-makers in the contracting machinery were by law directly or indirectly chosen by the minister.
My criticisms were frequent.
Under the coalition government from 2015 I did not keep up the same stream of attack partly because I was no longer present and partly because I did not have the same stream of information. From mid 2016 to mid 2017 I was dealing with my wife’s illness and her death with its usual consequences. I also remember asking Mr. Christopher Ram whether the new government was not entitled also to what is called a “honeymoon period.” I forgot that he was an auditor and would be responsible if he saw slippages in accountability and failed to call them out. However, I did raise issues that were obvious to me at a distance. I think the first was the hefty pay increase given by the new ministers to themselves compared to the pittance offered to the mass of public servants. I asked in a letter whether the two groups were not part of the same economy. Another passing issue I raised was the coalition’s apparent reluctance to approve the issue of a stamp to mark the 100th anniversary of Dr. Jagan’s birth. The third that comes to mind was the protest by some of us men and women of the former WPA over the attempt to send home thousands of sugar workers without severance pay. I had never seen the coalition itself as responsible for the decline of the sugar industry which President Hoyte had employed Booker Tate to bring back to life. It was Mr. Jadgeo and his comrades who got rid of Booker Tate and embarked on the Skeldon flagship project that is now regarded by some competent but unfair persons who have treated it on Global Span as a pardonable disaster. It is not widely known for example that during the Jagdeo presidency industrialists in Guyana had to import molasses to be able to produce their commodities.
I want to recall for the benefit of all concerned that I had never been impressed with the way the coalition was devised and that I said so in writing when I wrote more than once that I had never read the Cummingsburg Accord, the coalition’s founding document as I do not believe that those signing it had read it either.
I turn now to my persistent refusal to join the chorus over the Region 4 fiasco in the March 2020 general elections. Those who read the letter signed by Moses Bhagwan and me published on March 10, 2020, may wish to return to it and see in it not only our perhaps premature call for a solution in the face of incidents of violence, but also was a very clear welcome to the presence of international observers in such a hotly contested election.
To say that those who signed that letter are callous of the integrity of our elections is really to invent absurdity.
Speaking for myself I do not jump down the throats of subordinates. The mismatches in Region 4 between the spreadsheet and the basic original documents sealed in the ballot boxes do not require comments from an exile unless those at home present in the process and monitoring it are unsure of their own judgement. As a person also interested in drama the picture in my mind is that of a miserable subordinate now charged with offenses, standing in a pillory while his elated accusers feel justified in calling on passersby to stop and throw stones at the poor wretch. This child don’t do that. Not far away, on the wharfs as though to celebrate the end of one regime and the beginning of another, container vessels leave our shores with record tonnages of the white substance with no expression of complicity on the part of anyone. Let me explain. I began cultivating locks after sitting at the press table in a court and hearing a magistrate order that a prisoner’s locks be cut off. Secondly, I once became very unpopular in my home village because I dared to attend the funeral of a young coconut thief fatally shot in the act by the village ranger in the village backlands.
That is one side of it. The other side is that one election list of candidates which did not spend thirty-four million dollars to hire MERCURY from the USA has been complaining that its opposite number engaged in documented irregularities and as I believe, used these accusations in an election petition that is now before the courts. Please note that I have never denied or try to excuse the allegations made by the anti-coalition parties about their observations. Are my critics telling me that I, as a sensitive human being must ignore the fact that allegations of irregularities by the winning list are yet to be investigated by the courts as prescribed by the constitution?
I repeat that, assuming I still have the physical ability to do so, I shall at the end of the issues before the court, especially the unexplored election petition, offer my own opinion of the conduct of the major contestants in the March 2, 2020 general elections.
Yours respectfully
Eusi Kwayana
