By GHK Lall-In absorbing the territory covered by SN’s February 3, 2025 editorial titled “Tepui, Inc and 10%, it is astonishing how many areas are covered. They are all ugly, furnish all Guyanese with a picture of what they have for representative entities at the national level. National, not regional or village office level. What is not deformed is derelict, offers a stunning indictment of what the PPP Government and its fantasists insist is clean governance, principled leadership. If there is anything clean and principled in those two tiers, then I am the frontrunner for being the holiest of holy men.
The central issue is no longer how a group was awarded the Belle View pump station contract, but how so many sensitive and crucial national institutions stand for nothing. Other than what disfigures this country. National Procurement (NPTAB) and National Drainage (NDIA) are major presences in Guyana, and not corner shop affairs. Their names convey the vast swath of their responsibilities, oversight; and the mandatory requirement that their handling of the business, the precious millions, of the Guyanese people is a testimony to ethical presences and actions.
When Guyanese see both, they will recognize them. I look, but don’t see much of either of the two. When ethical presences are mostly and severely lacking, then there would be only certain kinds of actions. This is what Guyanese have had, not just with what went on with the Tepui, Inc award, but in a slew of awards smaller and lower on the public radar.
Nobody lodges a complaint for fear of being made into a marked man or group. The word for that is blacklisting. Except that there is no electronic or paper list, which emphasizes how much skill and cunning go into making a corrupt system still dirtier. So hopeful bidders stay silent, wait for the call that it is their turn to get something, some scrap from the contract table. Notably, the controversial contract awards have been accompanied by a common plague: delayed delivery, or ramshackle delivery.
Really, two plagues not one, with poor Guyanese carrying the load. PPP Government political hijinks have their role in national procurement, with the right people onboard to ensure that contract outcomes follow a prearranged path. Don’t expect a memo, or any incriminating phone recording. The tricksters and slicksters are too brilliant for such lapses. Three quarter billion plus for Tepui Inc, plus billions for a school, a wharf, and these are the high-profile ones that possessed one chief characteristic: the outrageousness of those awards. There is no penalty too large, no pen too small, for those behind such political and bureaucratic shenanigans.
Then there is that other grandly inspiring presence, the Public Procurement Commission (PPC). Public doesn’t mean private, nor perverse. Yet, even a cursory observation confirms that this is how the PPC sees as the fittest way to carry out its mandate. The watchdog is more in need of watching due to its propensity to negligence and indifference, and its possession of skills that would make a spray painter or a mason with a trowel glow with pride. There is a saying on Wall Street that has scorching power, which I share.
When certain jobs just must be done a certain way, then one had better get the people, who match the demands of the situation. I am left with a single choice: extend warm congratulations to President Ali and President Jagdeo for their cunning selections of personnel for NPTAB (national), NDIA (national), the NRF (national oil fund) and the PPC (national). Do other Guyanese see what I see, think along the lines that I do? For the most part, the singular presences so direly needed to pilot these national agencies in a straight line are just not there.
Whether prior national reputation or not, what Guyanese live with now are mainly national failures. More saboteurs (political leadership plants) working on the inside, than guardians of the people’s interests. It takes a certain kind of governor to identify such dismal luminosities whose first priority is to secure their place, prove their reliability in trying circumstances. National oil money, national procurement money, national scrutiny of how the processes worked, and there they stand, justify decisions made.
Under the PPP Government, and the slip-and-slide skills of its cleverer heads, what Guyanese endure is more than bureaucratic corruption, more than spineless, mindless, characterless sentinels. Guyanese are given a bird’s eye view of a vast national criminal enterprise at high revs. There are coordinators high up, willing collaborators right below in interlocking layers.
With a political-criminal conspiracy from the inception, it is inevitable that a criminal business on a national scale would result. The determining presences are in place; the record is of those who sell themselves, through faked blindness and dumbness. It takes a certain kind of leadership to make such choices, celebrate them. Tepui, Inc is that proverbial tip. If national is this distorted and deceptive, then the regionals have their own costly practice. I am told that this is clean governance, transformational leadership. Indeed, some are transformed, and how!
