Dear Editor,
With 2019 ending, I arrive at a steely conclusion: the local lunatic fringe is now in total charge. Whenever I think that we cannot increase the population of this formidable group, I am reminded of how mathematically challenged I have become. Yes, the environment makes unqualified morons of all.
Take this rancid coalition affair. The partners not only had no clothes on, they lacked any fig leaf to cover nakedness. I noticed how much this matter of positions, people and seats boiled down to the settled norm in Guyana: percentages. Here was the tale: for crooked contractors and political and bureaucratic friends, the number is 20% of the project cost, with more promised for cost overruns. Well, the APNU+AFC frat house upped that parliamentary ante to 30%, in the bartering of Guyana. It was a case of the high stakes of higher political theater. With leaders like these, why worry about Venezuela? Or Exxon?
Meanwhile, in that twilight zone monopolised by the PPP, it was final: 100% for the maximum leader, zero for the paltry pretender, in the time-honoured way, truth, and life expounded by Chairman Mao and Stalin: no challengers. So, what will it be little comrade? I think I heard the response: anything you say boss. Or in the wistful words of Ricky Nelson: “you are the only one.” Where does this imbecility end?
On the issue of accounting for missing money, the fall guy for another failed state case was a prosecutor given a dog without a bark to confront domestic bookkeeping desperadoes. That dog of a case – no teeth, no menace, not even a wag – started out with a growl and ended with a whimper. Our accounting engineers are the best: Show them some money, and they will show the blueprint for creating magic with the books, which makes conmen of the lawyers.
In this la-la land, nothing is of substance, which includes forensic audits. How could all that money be rearranged without illegality involved? Could I be the lunatic here? If not, then what is the problem with these embarrassing legal failures? It is that smart men play the idiot, grinning in pretended craziness. It may not be the Marlon Brando school of method acting, but it has convinced many a judge, themselves no slouches in the lunatic ward, to get with the programme. I hear the gravy train is rather juicy. If all the money stolen in this country were recycled, there would be no need for oil to make cash handouts possible.
Earlier, there was this family fight, not over house and land, but over naming a chairperson for the mythical GECOM. A hundred years hence, the region will look back and ask: did that really happen? Does such a place exist? Can there be that kind of people? Anywhere? I observed the surreal: too unilateral, too biased, too many doubtful characters. I believe that I did observe a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Arabian Nights in the GECOM junkyards. Depending on the point of view, politicians wonder today whether they got Queen Boadicea or Lady Macbeth. Instead of the melancholy of the Drifters and “I count the tears,” it is now the taunts of Sparrow “who she guh cry fuh…” which depends on “who she guh hug up tight.” See, mouth open and story jump out; it is a talkative society.
Yet, in the most mysterious lunacy within this nationally talkative space, once garrulous men play dumb; men who once boasted of their money and power, suddenly take vows of absolute silence. They are not Catholics (mainly); nor was there any gag order; nor any (official) state eavesdropping devices in place. And yet, nobody knows anything about smuggled Venezuelan gold smuggled here, or stuff passing through local airports. It is not that sentinels are not diligent. A traveler was accosted at the CJIA and given the second degree over gillbacker. How does anything get out of here? Since the offending article was hassar (baby crocs, the Yanks call them), how could anyone, but a certified lunatic make that (shakedown) mistake?
Now I arrive at a different point: how does anything not get out of here? After all, street powder resembles Johnson Baby Powder. A man was regularly flying a planeload of booty to this country, with his own private state-provided hangar, and nobody in the hills of Timehri knew. No seeing, hearing, talking in what is now a silent society. Yet the clueless advance to certify that a six-inch hassar is a 10-lb slab of catfish. What a lunatic attic this land has become, gone to the dogs. I blame the politics.
I saved the best for last. It is this titillating affair about ads. The languid PNC came alive to bash the starched Stabroek News people by pulling a fast one. I sum up this way: no love, no money. Look! It is not Plato nor Cicero, but there it is. That will show all Guyanese (including opposition) who is boss around here, Chatapultec declaration and all, as well as all that hot air about freedoms. Governments decide who gets ad dollars: no bad people. If ever there was a case for unilateralism, this was for the crown, which is atop the head of the chief imitating loony English monarchs. Or were they Romans?
It was a low one. For here was the careful and conservative Guyana Publications Inc, accused of being a mouthpiece for ANUG. Though the new guys need the help, the outcome is foregone, as the PNC knows full well. Lists and all. ID cards and all. Why ruffle feathers with that kind of hard card? When I look at this compressed snapshot of areas, lunatic fringe qualifies for understatement of the century. For Guyana is now an outright lunatic society. The CCJ was restrained by courtesy and judicial dignity from so saying. I am not, and I just did.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
