Dear Editor,
I noted with no surprise the naturally intellectually flaccid response by the Department of Public Information (hereinafter referred to as ‘DPI’) in seeking to justify the President and the Attorney General’s receipt of a tax-free salary in an attempt to justify their very own existence at the DPI.
Allow me to précis the thrust of the argument advanced by the sum total of the (un)intellectual protagonists and/or political appointees at the DPI in response to my public questioning, as a duly elected Member of Parliament, of President Granger and the Attorney General’s tax free salaries: in essence the DPI said these were justified because President Jagdeo, President Ramotar and Anil Nandlall received tax-free salaries.
Not surprisingly, this response is exactly why the swing voters in this past election are so disappointed with the APNU+AFC government that they are publicly stating that they will never vote for the APNU or PNC or AFC again. Had the ears of the APNU+AFC politicians and the DPI been close to the ground they would have heard the resounding and resonating public resentment with the APNU+AFC government and the assertion that “there has been no change but an exchange”. What the DPI fails to realise is that the vast majority of the 50% of persons who may have voted for the APNU+AFC coalition were expecting change (for the better) as was promised on the campaign trail, so any attempt to now justify any wrong, in this case a tax-free salary, with a statement of ‘well it used to happen in the past and even though we could correct it we won’t’ is obtuse and simply stupid, but more importantly, it shows conclusively that the APNU+AFC government and the DPI are out of touch with the people of the country.
The concluding paragraph which makes reference to my salary at the Office of the President before I resigned in 2012, a taxable $400,000 per month which, apropos, is $1.4M less per month than the president and prime minister receive and $500,000 less per month than the senior ministers receive in this APNU+AFC government (even though I have more degrees/qualifications, better grades from better universities than almost all of them) is a fallacious argument known as argumentum ad hominem. Nice try, but the public will not be distracted by this stratagem, and the fact is that the President and the Attorney General ought to be paying tax on their public service salaries.
A comprehensive review of the executive government was done and there was no attempt to make the President and the Attorney General’s salaries taxable, and there is no reason in the world that could be proffered to justify their tax-free salary.
Second, this very ad hominem statement evinces definitively that the DPI is unprofessional, incompetent, and politicised. Instead of focusing some of their attention to make cheap political shots at me, the DPI has a public-good duty to perform and may want to consider asking its colleagues in the private media (they can start with Denis Chabrol), to score its performance and it will find that it is abysmally low. Further, another accurate barometer of the performance of the DPI is the public sentiment and approval rating for the government of the day. The incorrigibly low approval rating of this APNU+AFC government would lead one to conclude that all is not kosher at the DPI, but as the folk adage says, ‘easy lesson hard fa dunce.’
Finally, accepting that all court documents have to be filed and form part of the public record, I challenge the DPI to produce court documents which I would have filed in more than two matters before my resignation from the Office of the President within two weeks, failing which I shall be taking the necessary steps to identify the writer of the press release and to commence defamation litigation forthwith.
Yours faithfully,
Charles S Ramson,
MP