Over the years, I have learned to cultivate great tolerance for stupidity; still greater patience for the asinine. Tolerance snaps, however, whenever a word is mentioned about the benefits bill for former presidents. Here’s the short and sweet: not one damn cent more for anyone of them. To raise the issue of more benefits for ex-presidents is more than eye-pass, more than nauseating, more than obnoxious. It is more of the moneygrubbing schemes that come out of the money mad PPP brain trust, with its new ways to gouge the Guyana treasury more comprehensively.
Forget about the numbers, how much they collect now, in aggregate. Forget about how much they live in the lap of luxury. Forget how they grow distant from the people who had put them where they were (and are). Simply recall all those who they gored and bled to death. What I place before every citizen-from ex-president, sitting president, departed president to every person, whether pasha or peasant in Guyana’s population-is simple. Ordinary Guyanese are gasping for breath, cannot afford to take care of their basic needs, are dying on their feet, yet the PPP Govt is so vulgar as to persist with this abomination of a bill for more for ex-presidents. Guyanese are crying over how they will find the next meal, find food to feed their children, and there is this bill that it the epitome of the crass and calculating on how to make fat cats fatter, and the already rich stinking rich. If Guyana’s ex-presidents (all presidents of this country) are not filthy rich, then there are only dirt-poor people in this country, in which I must include the contractor class and the private sector royalty class.
What kind of Cabinet could come up with this repugnance? What does it not have to occupy its time and attention, that it can find the drive to concoct this obscenity for former presidents, which ranks will soon be further bloated? Time will tell the class and quality, the decency and integrity, of the sum of Guyana’s parliamentarians as this vomit-inducing bill comes up for debate. Someone should spit on it. Another should go further and urinate on it. And someone should find the courage to do a number two on it. If dildos could make their way into the National Assembly, my recommendations should find some favorable reception in that once hallowed place.
Should this bill pass (and it will, the numbers considered), how do dese peeple (MPs) face the suffering Guyanese public, and tell them that they are looking out for them? How low is too low for some people? Of most importance, given the daily travails of hurting Guyanese now stretching into years, how do they react-greet and treat-with those who betray them, who take advantage of them and use them, who take them for dumb suckers and then take them for a ride without end? Should Guyanese still greet with a smile and a garland anyone who voted for the benefits bills for ex-presidents, they deserve every glob of spittle directed their way by their political heroes. They have earned every poke in the eye (delivered with a mocking laugh) from their political users and abusers. Only a people, like domestic violence victims battered into numbness, look forward to more blows, more insults, and more degradations from those who say that they care.
And, to close this out, the ex-presidents that still have a modicum of decency and honesty about them, should flat out reject any willingness, any inclination, to accept one penny from the benefits bill when it passes. Somebody, some leader, some citizen has to manifest that he or she identifies with the poor, struggling Guyanese people. Is as one with them, at least in the spirit. Leave the greedy to capitalize and collect. Leave the sleazy to work their magic and take the fullest advantage of a bill that is done in all but its final sick passage.
