Dear Editor,
I read Prime Minister Samuel Hinds’ letter to Stabroek News and extracts from his press release addressing ACDA’s Tacuma Ogunseye’s controversial call for Black Guyanese to engage in street protests if the PPP wins the 2011 election and then refuses to engage in meaningful shared governance.
The letter and press release reek of hypocrisy, because they do not address the core reason why Mr. Ogunseye issued his call for street protests, and the core reason is that the government believes its victory at the polls entitles it to engage in widespread corruption that covers government jobs and contracts, and public finances and resources, all of which may require street protests to correct if elections don’t result in regime change.
I am not for one moment echoing any calls for unlawful actions but something has to give in Guyana to stop the PPP government from ripping off the people’s monies and resources with no accountability.
Prior to becoming a prime ministerial candidate running on the PPP ticket with the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan in 1992, Mr. Hinds worked with the bauxite industry in Linden as a senior manager, and seldom thought aloud his views on the decline of both the industry and the economy under the PNC government.
When Dr. Jagan extended the invitation to him while he was on the UARD platform, he accepted with this observation and promise: Since the PPP holds a numerical majority support among Indians, and Indians usually vote PPP, then the PPP will win the elections and he, being Black, would become a bridge between the Black community he represents and the Indian-dominated PPP government, which publicly promised a lean and clean government compared to the PNC.
Nineteen years later, PM Hinds has not only failed to be a symbolic or substantive bridge between Blacks and the Indian dominated government, but he has failed in his patriotic duty to the entire nation, because whereas he expressed measured satisfaction that Mr. Ogunseye acknowledged that the PNC did rig elections, he has been deafeningly silent in the face of the PPP government’s endemic corruption, which is just as horrible as rigged elections. Has he actually morphed from Civic representative to PPP acolyte and from a bridge for Blacks to a bridge for the PPP?
As a self-described bridge for Blacks, I dare PM Hinds to tell the people of Guyana what bills he piloted into law and what projects he pioneered on behalf of Blacks anywhere. As one with ministerial responsibility for mining and an ex-bauxite manager, let him say why the current bauxite impasse is still not resolved. Let him also say why the government sent Agriculture Minister, Robert Persaud, and not him, into predominantly Black Buxton to pacify Buxtonians after government decided to clear away dense bushes perceived to have been used by criminal elements as a safe haven.
To the politically trained eye, PM Hinds’ sudden letter and press release to counter Mr. Ogunseye’s controversial call actually raises the question as to whether he is being used by the government to counter Mr. Ogunseye, who is also Black?
Recall, Editor, back in 2006, when retired Police Commissioner, Winston Felix’s office phone was tapped and the contents of his conversation were released to media houses to embarrass him, rather than order the police to investigate who tapped the COP’s phone, the government instructed the Prime Minister to investigate Mr. Felix.
Why the PM and not the Home Affairs Minister? Was it not to use one Black government official to do its bidding to embarrass a Black senior police official of whom the government disapproved?
Mr. Ogunseye obviously has his political reasons for calling for street action, but given that the system of governance today is fraught with discrimination in the way multi-million dollar contracts are awarded and public monies and resources are being ripped off by a handful, while the bulk of the people are barely getting by, what recourse to justice and fairness do minority ethnic groups have? Yet discrimination and corruption are the realities this government has created and on which PM Hinds bites his tongue!
Where is PM Hinds’ voice on the disgraceful turn of events regarding the Synergy road construction project? Kaieteur News made a jaw-dropping revelation last August when it carried a photocopy of a 2004 Memorandum of Understanding signed by PM Hinds, GPL Chairman, Ronald Alli, and Synergy boss, Makeshwar ‘Fip’ Motilall for Synergy to build the entire Amaila Fall Hydro Project. When shown the copy last year that stipulated the entire project should be finished in August 2010, PM Hinds said he can’t remember signing the MOU; nevertheless, Synergy wound up being awarded a US$15.4 contract to build the road to the generating facility.
Last word we received about that road project was that Synergy was woefully behind schedule and will have to sub-contract out the work. He knew, and many others pointed out, that Motilall never built any road anywhere or never built a hydro project anywhere, so why was Motilall given the contract in the first place? How many more contracts involving hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars have not ended up like Synergy’s road to nowhere?
This is also why I find PM Hinds’ declaration that “Ogunseye, and a number of others like him, must carry a major part of the blame for any lack in the success of Afro-Guyanese,” as hypocritical, because even though he said he’d be some kind of bridge for Blacks I can’t find any record of what PM Hinds did to help Afro-Guyanese succeed.
PM Hinds may have started out well-intentioned as the primary Civic representative of the PPP in 1992, but today, he has morphed into an unapologetic mouthpiece of the corrupt, vindictive and visionless PPP government. He may not have been tainted by corruption, but his deafening silence has confirmed him as an impotent material witness who said and did nothing.
Yours faithfully,
Emile Mervin
