August 2nd marked four years of the PPP’s resumption of power in Guyana. It has been four years of PPP Government felonies, PPP Government farces, and PPP fixes to coverup the first two. On August 2, 2020, when President Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali took the oath of office (his oath), I swore to myself, hoped to myself, that finally it was the dawning of a new day in Guyana. Most disastrously, on the fourth anniversary of the PPP governance and the Ali political junta, that bright new day has not dawned; 1461 days later, it has been the long, dark, stormy night of the PPP generals, and the day of the living dead for a government that is all about decay, defecations, and what devastates country and citizens.
First, there were the North Korean type advertisements. Kim Jong Un would have difficulty stopping his chortling. Miles of roads built. Many more infrastructural monuments delivered and standing. Programs and provisions that testify to the thoroughness and truths of a PPP Government and leadership determined to propagandize its way out of ugly and financially grisly Guyanese reality. It is the PPP Government’s harrowing reality. Simply ask Guyanese long on the waiting line, and chronically short in the receiving line that never has their name or number. Behind every great political canvas, there is a greater series of political crimes. There are those webs that emphasize the incomparable national criminal enterprise that the PPP Government has now indisputably become, what it now owns irreversibly. Pages of propaganda are not enough to paper over or overpower four years of governance perversities.
I invite Excellency Ali to tell the people the subtitles behind his government’s ads. The genuine articles. I give him a primer or two. For all that flurry-indeed, that crazed frenzy-of building and parceling out goodies, how many of those parcels and goodies ended up in the hands of his kind and his comrades. By way of my own subtitles, his kind is of the type that always find themselves intimately attached to the Guyanese trough. Frontmen and women, shell companies, phantom operators and all those ministers, Excellency Ali, with bundles of unexplained wealth. Wealth to make Midas green with envy.
What the PPP Government of President Ali has refined and reintroduced, then successfully executed, is a reverse Robin Hood regime. Take what belongs to poor Guyanese and load and reload the pockets of the PPP Government’s friends and their families (right down the lineage), and the cabals of comrades and cronies. The economist in that old slippery Sovietologist, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, would call it the reverse distribution of national assets.
And that other overblown self-styled warrior, Dr. Anil Nandlall, would hasten to reassure by asking about laws broken, as well as he who accuses must advance. I advance with this offering Dr. Attorney General: unexplained wealth, and not merely at inconspicuous levels, nor only by a few of his colleagues, but those he would derogate as partners in crimes. All those fake governance institutions. All those business fronts, all those pieces of real estate, all those hands. The rich get super rich off the people. The have nots now have less than nothing.
Four years of misery, Excellency Ali. Alongside all the many instances of rehabilitation and rebuilding, there are those many Guyanese mouths that are without. There are those many Guyanese minds made wretched by the torments of needing and not having. But having a leader that is puffed up with pride, his own great importance, and others that have long shattered any claim to truth and morals and straight leadership and governance practices. Amid the false glitter of the last four years, the president has been the best example of the hollow log rolling downhill, while the other guy is the not-so-invisible hand that is a mailed fist aimed at his self-made Guyanese enemies.
In summary, President Ali’s four years of impersonating majesty has been of a monarch that paints over his palace in the gaudiest colors, but which has little sustenance on the inside. When the people ask for something sweet, President Ali gives them a stone. A whole barrage of those. Just absorb his haughty bearing, his swaggering manner of speaking of the man who would be king. The mystery is which one: King Ethelred the Unready, King John of tyranny’s effluences, or King Kong. Ali, Jagdeo, and Nandlall prances around talking about the return of democracy in Guyana, when the environment is now undeniably one of demagoguery.
Guyanese live with half-truths, crypto truths, inconvenient truths, and the horrid truth of almost total lies for the last 1461 days, every single one of them. Demagoguery runs amok and the people run for cover. Days of darkness, with Burnham no longer owning that crown. Days of simmering wrath from people living with what demonizes, pulverizes. When the people fear the government, the government has mutated into the monstrosity of an army of barbaric crime bosses. Is that not the PPP Government’s record of the last four years? If anyone seeks the identity of the bosses, they know who to look at, what heights, and where to find them.
What kind of government, what criminal practitioners disguising themselves as leaders, unleash, witch-hunters and headhunters to do hatchet jobs on outspoken citizens? Democracy or demagoguery in action fellow Guyanese? It would be interesting to learn what the diplomatic community thinks. It was Excellency Ali, who four years ago swore to deliver transparency and accountability. Guyanese got demagoguery. I always thought that English is a second language for the leader now competing for the master manipulator mantle.
The PPP Government leaders scorn listening to tribunes for the poor, pursuers of truth-in-government, those pressing for delivery of promises re the people’s patrimony. Where their vast oil patrimony is concerned, Guyanese now coexist with the PPP’s secret society. It is Dr. Ali’s transparency and accountability. To whom: Woods and Washington, Alistair and Antony (Mr. Foggy Bottom)? There is no amount of rhetoric that can erase, even ease, four years of wretchedness.
For four years, one PPP Government biggie after another has presented, maintained, a straight face, when they are among the biggest criminals to be found anywhere. Crime is so far gone in Guyana that it requires the Government of America to step in and help a crime-ridden government fix itself. Stop and search. Seize and strip. Airport escorts and legal stripteases and verbal dances. ‘I am innocent’ has been a repeated cry. Look who is doing the crying, then disappearing, leaving time to do the rest. This is called crime resolution by a crime-infested government. Circle the wagons and curse and criminalize critics. Communism was knocked off; Stalinism and Hitlerism held in reserve.
When the PPP Government should make an honest effort to clean its own house, it seeks to wipe the environment clean of conscientious objectors. Thanks for transparency on the last segment, Excellency Ali. It has been four years of fear for the fainthearted. It has been four years of farces to fix the felonies. It is a record of four years (1461 days) of government criminal wrongdoing, four years of leadership covering up, and four years of national struggling and suffering. Thanks for the memories, President Ali.
