Perhaps because he was a lawyer, when President Forbes Burnham was suspected of using all kinds of machinations, including peoples’ tax records, to gain their compliance, he loved to – improperly I believe – import the clean hands doctrine into politics: he who sought to criticize and challenge him or the state must come with clean hands. In other words, if you are accusing me of moral laxity you should be a morally upright person, for just as you are seeking to expose my amorality, I have a right to expose yours. You cannot accuse me of corruption, behave in a corrupt fashion yourself and hope to get off scot free.
Like many, I am attracted to the clean hands doctrine, for it speaks to a not unfamiliar kind of morality: take the beam out of your own eye before pointing out that of others; if you live in glass houses don’t throw stones; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; du fu du nah obeah, etc.
Echoes of this contention are being heard again in discourses regarding issues in the media in relation to the Speaker of the National Assembly, Mr. Raphael Trotman, in which he is accused of abusing an individual when he was thirteen years of age, and that involving Glenn Lall, the owner of the Kaieteur News, and the Commissioner-General of the Guyana