THOSE WITHOUT SIN
Freddie Kissoon column
Kaieteur News
April 19, 2007
When Trinidad 's Prime Minister, Patrick Manning, announced that he asked the Integrity Commission to investigate two of his senior Cabinet members on suspicion of corruption must have severely embarrassed the Government of Guyana. When that news was made public, the leadership of the Guyana Government must have felt a touch of shame as their eyes glanced on that caption in the newspaper.
The ruling party which forms the Government of Guyana would have been in power for 15 years come October 2007, yet to date, in a country where governmental corruption intrudes into the personal lives of the citizens, there has not been one single case of governmental sanction against the elite that forms the nerve-centre and the sub-centre of the administration of this poor land.
Guyana must go down in history as the only country where after 14 years in power, no one at a high level has even been disciplined with a soft brush much less hauled over the coals for graft and corruption. No one in the Government of Guyana does anything dishonest. The Guyana Government says it has a clean ship. Well then, in Georgetown , the world of politics has created God's most sinless and perfect children.
What is both exasperating and outlandish, is the lack of logic in understanding the canopy of protection that is offered to corrupt officials who don't even deserve a sympathetic hearing much less an umbrella to shelter from their perverted habits.
In sin there is logic. Something may be wrong but still may be logical. That is such an easy question to answer in philosophy once one is acquainted with the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and David Hume.
I will attempt to apply logic to situations where people have sinned. Normally people have feelings of gratitude and sentiments towards those with whom they have shared a long relationship. The enduring bond complicates moral questions. You feel a sense of obligation to help an intimate friend who has fallen from grace. You feel restrained in arguing for prosecution. This is a friend, and a friend in need is a friend indeed.
Each one of us has to face that dilemma at some point in our lives. We can choose to part company and let the chips fall where they are supposed to, or we can cross that line that we shouldn't, just for the sake of friendship.
In the PPP leadership, there are persons who have spent their entire lives growing up together. At Freedom House, there is an ideological cabal. They shelter in each other's arms. There is no way you can dissolve the House of History and Ideology that thrives in Freedom House.
Logically then, it took a newcomer to cry, “Look at the King, the King, the King! The King is naked as the day that he was born!” That newcomer was Khemraj Ramjattan. Though his father was a devoted PPP stalwart in Berbice, the younger Ramjattan missed out on those ideological training sessions in the former communist countries Eastern Europe and Cuba .
While most of the members of the inner circle at Freedom House, both young and old, underwent Marxist indoctrination in communist countries, Ramjattan went to a ‘capitalist” institution, UWI, to study law. He missed the ideological ride to Eastern Europe . He missed being sent to then former Czechoslovakia to help edit the journal of international communism, World Marxist Review, a place that Donald Ramotar and Clement Rohee spent five years together.
It was logical, then, to understand Ramjattan's intolerance in condoning wrong-doing. He had no loyalty to the historical, ideological clique.
The acceptance of unbecoming conduct, then, among this aging cabal is logical even though wrongdoing at any level in any place cannot be condoned.
A member of the Jagan School of protégés will not be exposed by another. This is the politics of ideological brotherhood. There must be knowledge that some of the palatial residences could not have been built with salaried money.
If bank loans were taken then it would take centuries to pay that back given the opulence of the houses. Mr. Donald Ramotar, last year at Jagan's death anniversary, insinuated that I had asked some businessmen to build a house for me. He replied in this newspaper after I challenged him.
He wrote; “who the cap fit let them wear it”. I am still waiting for the money from these businessmen. I was told by a high-level PPP leader that the home of a “big one” boasts of special interior decoration materials imported from Italy .
One of Cheddi's devout satraps has been involved in a visa scandal, the proceeds of which have been invested in the ocean (hope you read between the lines). But the cabal has stood with its members. This is what I mean about logic in sin.
What is incomprehensible is the protective coat for those who are newcomers and who have no political assets to offer the party. This is where the role of corruption in Guyana becomes fiendish and pathological to the point of self-destruction.
The PPP makes no distinction between the PPP leaders who have stood the test of time and those opportunistic newcomers who are simply milking the cow. In very few countries would the kind of corruption we see in Guyana , be tolerated by the ruling party.
Some of the corrupt officials PPP should have no sympathy for, because instead of adding to the PPP's capital, they subtract from it.
They have been brought into government to help their own credibility rather than the Government's. Why then does the PPP continue to live with its ongoing venality?
In a small country like Guyana , whispers of corruption are everywhere. Businessmen have friends in the media that they trust. They tell us which Minister has discreetly asked for “something in return.”
I know of one such high governmental official who the PPP had no use for, yet he was given a top-level job. He showed his gratitude by soliciting favours from businessmen. Of course when you expose dubious transactions, they are always vehemently denied. This has to be the land of God 's infallible saints.