Dear Editor,
The PPP has gotten away with a lot in Guyana, because of our collective instinct to think in binary terms ‒ us versus them. There is an unwillingness to engage complexity. The PPP cannot be riggers because the PNC are the riggers. The PPP cannot be corrupt because the PNC is corrupt. The PPP is democratic because the PNC is authoritarian.
This is part of the problem I have with Nigel Hinds’ recent critique of SARU’s announcement that Guyana lost over $300 billion annually through corruption under the PPP (‘Thomas, others in the WPA leadership have abandoned the working class’, SN, February 21). Mr Hinds, generally a very astute commentator, unfortunately reduced the issue to numbers and to the political record of Clive Thomas and the WPA.
It is that kind of obliviousness to the political sociology of the country that has allowed the PPP to get away with the narrative of self-virtue. Nigel Hinds does not set out to give the PPP a pass, but his twisting of the discourse away from its central objective of confronting the PPP’s corruption will end up achieving that objective.
Yes, we don’t want an unaccountable SARA that is above the law and we certainly don’t want any individual to have extreme power. Yes, you can challenge the methodology used by Clive Thomas in arriving at his estimation of how much we have lost. Yes, you can castigate the WPA for abandoning the working class and Walter Rodney. But at the end of the day the central issue is confronting corruption under the PPP which I think Mr Hinds would agree reached unprecedented heights. It is not about making Jagdeo or any PPP leader homeless, it’s about dismantling the out-of-control mansion of corruption which afflicts Guyana. There must be a way to critique the WPA and Thomas and to argue over the accuracy of numbers without discrediting the genuine effort to combat the cancer of corruption.
Yours faithfully,
David Hinds
