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Guyanese have to be among the biggest frauds and hypocrites anywhere in the known universe. We lament and wail and wring our hands and beat our breasts over the former High Commissioner to India (HC) degeneration into the detritus of the national dumpsite. Guyana’s, not India’s. The HC, the representative, the man is but a symptom of what has saturated and stumbled and sunk this land. For emphasis, the man once in New Delhi is a symptom, a mere expression of the diseases of this land. He is but the latest manifestation of the ugly arrogance, the swaggering insolence, and the brutish callousness that is prodigious in government, in leadership, along the national shoreline. The fish rots from the head; the head sickens or is sick, and the rest of the body follows suit.
I thought for a moment about using the words national environment and national culture to outline what the one-time HC delivered in India to dispatch the troublesome. I settled for the national shoreline above. Like those above him, in the leadership food chain, the disgraced HC also has embraced the quarrelsome, the loathsome, as what is the now standard response to the cumbersome. Anyone observing senior national leaders cannot help noting how ill-equipped by upbringing, by personal discipline, by awareness of the vast extents of their responsibilities, challenges and naysayers and troublemakers and all to deal with demanding circumstances.
When political leaders settle for the heavy-handed and bludgeoning broadside strokes to register their points, or overpower their tormentors, then not much more can be expected of those that are part of their apparatus. I don’t think they are registering anything, other than they are on edge, and always ready to settle scores. When one leader, or the second, (or any other) should be about truth in all of its glorious radiance, then there is no need at all to engage in these hedges and camouflages that take over a year to see the light of day. No national holiday of any denomination can undo that, their beautifully founded and conceived glows, their well-intended gleams are not enough to overcome the impenetrable darkness that now enshrouds the people running the show here. There are so many of them, that the dreadful ranks of the PPP are not enough to accommodate them.
I take a breath in this fierce charge at Guyanese hypocrisies and farces, this assault on our deceptiveness, and point to the first belated release from a Government Ministry that was, and ought to be, a prime repository of what are the ideals of this country. The Foreign Affairs Ministry is our face, that of our brothers and sisters, both locally and internationally, and the best that it could muster in a time of what some are calling a ‘crisis’ situation is that the matter is “closed.” This is how matters possessing a certain deplorably unique strain is minimized, dismissed, be done with, and that would have been that, except for that damning video.
Venturing farther afield, and before this incident, I found myself going through the uphill challenge of identifying a handful of PPP Government Ministers, who are emblematic of integrity, honesty, and untarnished reputation, and I fell flat on my face. The best I could come up with were two only, and one had some qualifiers (more another time). This is with relevance to money only, not the broader business of politics. If this is even remotely accurate, then expectations for those crude, rude, and nude in the surrounding cast can only be lower, and in so many more avenues that are of representation of the people.
I exhort doing the same exercise for senior public servants (juniors given a pass for now), and invite the bold in the midst to name a dozen out of the hundreds, and see how well they do. As leaders go, the lesser minions go. It is why there is such great care by one senior leader to surround himself with people of a certain crooked character. They will steal, they will not speak; they sell themselves. This is clean governance at its best. And here is the denounced, dismissed, and should be discarded High Commissioner, who is an extension and embodiment of them all.
I repeat something I said from the inception. I don’t want to be in the same spaces with them. I largely succeed, and am content. I used to scorn them, especially those at the top. I have stopped, for I recognize sickness, helplessness, and gracelessness. I feel for these brothers and sisters, and I wish I could help them change. They have to want with a passion to do so, for the better of all. To fellow Guyanese: be real: stop making a spectacle of selves with this caterwauling. At different times, to different degrees, the former HC is what we applauded in parliament, what we support in media, what we are about. Yes! Persaud is you, including me.
