Corruption for the PPP Government is a big problem, what’s now a crisis. The problem for the PPP is that corruption is different this time around, can’t be suppressed, can’t be shouted down. I pity the government’s defenders armed with spoons to empty oceans. I retrace the years for a revisit of prior corruptions, then return to where and how corruption is now.
Guyanese have heard how PNC governments were corrupt. They were, of that let there be neither be mistake nor minimizing. There were ideas of who the thieves were, a good sense of how many, and how high they operated. Other aspects of that corrupt time were: 1) all of the national numbers were pale in comparison to now; 2) the pace and size of developments were anemic when matched against those of now; 3) the media was a pale shadow of what is in operation today; and 4) Guyana’s mass of poor scraped, survived, battled, and rebuilt elsewhere, while today, the new mass of poor Guyanese wonder why their condition is so grave with so much happening. Their conclusions are firm: their continued impoverishment is necessary, so that others can get obscenely rich on their dollar.
The evidences of the PPP’s webs (not so mysterious, really) of corruption are visible, immediate, and personal. PNC corruptions-whether 50 years ago or 5)-were real and pinching. No question, no pushback. But they wither in scale and magnitude when compared to what is going on today under the PPP oil government. Magnitude so dense that even PPP faithful are awed. Tangible and so profuse that it’s like colliding with a drunken crowd coming out of a cricket ground, one that is rejoicing in a sweet victory. People get trampled. The tiny are brushed aside. Often, those of no standing are spat upon by the celebrating, the stuffed-up haughty walking on stilts. Summary: corruption is personal; close; inflaming. Because corruptions scorch at individual, familial, and communal levels.
Reality check: headlines come into a steady, glistening stream. Guyana. So, who are the Guyanese benefiting? Why am I not benefiting, doing better than five years ago? Only small trickles of money were available before for the poor, because of bigger priorities (roads, structures), so from where so much money now, with so many rich promises brandished now? How can that be, when oil prices have tumbled by approximately 25%? Sure, a greater volume of oil is pumped daily, but why am I stuck, and in-laws, and near and far cousins? Why when we all look like the government? If this is our draining, anguished plight, then what about those Guyanese who seem to be roasted by the sun at high temps? So, who is snatching the prosperity of stupendous GDP, harvesting incomparable economic growth? No one, not one leader or minister in the governing cabal, can or will say that Guyana is doing badly, merely ordinary. Thus, the inquiry that houses so much pain, anxiety, despair: what happened to all the fancy money? Wha happen to mee? Where’s the money going? Whose hands, pockets? Who was it that just raced past in that luxury vehicle kicking up pebbles in my face, while laffing their heads off? While my back is breaking from scrapping around for a meal to last through today?
Nah maan, meh nah guh faar in school, but dah caan be frum deh salaree alone! It’s not the Wharton School of Business, but it is what the commonfolk now make their business. It’s the best education about corruption that one can get. And ordinary Guyanese who have that education daily, are now so well-equipped that they can open their own corruption schools. Scratch the PNC from that equation. Who’s left, but the many corruptions of the PPP through this one and that one, and the other one? Introduce de li’l bhai (apology) and what about him (warts and all) that sends the PPP into such fits of frenzies from head to toe? Since the PPP has been so clean, so good and caring for the poor people of Guyana, who the hell in the PPP should give a damn about him? Irony of ironies: he may not be the antichrist, but he is feared, nonetheless. The puzzle that the poor studies. He is supposed to be Candidate Anticorruption; therefore, he ought to be a most welcomed sibling of the anti-corrupt in the PPP. Particularly given past friendships, old familiarity.
Whoever denies corruptions, claims doing right, now makes bright promises, the people are still naked, emptyhanded, frightened. If they can’t make it in today’s Guyana, don’t count today, the future dangled by desperate political leaders must be one more cruel mirage. The wages of corruption are distrust, disdain, dismissal. Corruption warnings mocked yesterday. Today’s promised kindnesses might just be a little too late.
