Dear Editor,
As the latest Jagdeo exposé sullies the senses and sensibilities, so much is uncovered. Sure, a slip shows, stray underwear lace and frills (don’t ask which kind) escape, and there is a peculiar rancid nakedness exhibited in full colour before jaded onlookers.
Here the country has myriad citizens for whom the monthly light bill is a torture; here are families by the thousands who struggle with patching together the daily minibus fare; and here is where a hundred dollars for the necessity of cellphone credit is almost always a desperate testing out-of-reach moment.
Here, too, is staggering youth unemployment, food beyond the outstretched fingertips and shrivelled cardboard tongues of the miserable hungry and their wretched children. Here there is so much more that knots the nerves and clenches at the gut with implacable, remorseless ferocity.
And yet calculating leaders, and their craven godless, conscienceless cohorts – all repugnant beyond words – sit and scheme on how to fix themselves lavishly, how to set themselves high on the hog, how to rip-off and gouge endlessly at the fruits of office and the fat of the land.
It might be fine for the pathologically greedy, the political mobsters, and the bureaucratic gangsters to connive at these things, and then get away with it all, but how do they face the nation and spew the utter drivel about mobility, prosperity, and unity? How do they face the multitude of weak and poor in this society? How do they face their own supporters, those with a brain in the head? Most intriguing of all is how do they live with themselves and face their children, their friends, their neighbours? That is unless these, too, are part of the skulking, opportunistic pack at the financial trough extracting their bounty.
When I consider all of these abominations, I come to an inescapable conclusion. It is that the opposition is more patient than me; it is that the oppressed citizens of this country are more tolerant, by far, than me. And it is that both opposition and people are more understanding and better than me. Clearly, when looked at cumulatively, the obscene extravagances are more than malignancies and monstrosities. They are all of this; and then there is the irrefutable evidence of an incurable sickness that affects us for simply sharing the same air with those who contaminate it.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
