Dear Editor,
I just came off the road and there they were: hanging, staring, bracing. From above and around and below, from everywhere it seems. That would be the paraphernalia of elections, inclusive of flags, symbols, messages, and so on. I have been toying with a thought or two on this shady, closely guarded secret of politics in Guyana, and now I must drag a few things into the light and put them on the table.
I open this paper via the technological marvel called the internet and there it is, right in the face. I am encouraged to vote. I feel as though I am at the bus park, with the touts pulling this way and that to get attention, to gather my business; perhaps, to pick my pocket too. As to the latter, they must have learned from the political masters here, the same ones who now seek the votes of Guyanese, the same ones who have picked us to the bone and bloodless, for a million years it feels. But is it really expected that any sensible, even the half-witted, would actually vote for a party this way, through one of these newspaper or roadside urgings?
Here are some other questions that are relevant at this hour of our existence. Whether online, or from a lantern post (I prefer that old-fashioned description) or on the roadway, or on local television and social media (both of which I never engage), the first point is this: these things cost money. To create. To publish. To staff and monitor and leverage. This is just the peripheral lacy stuff, so to speak, the cheaper fare. Now for the first question: Where is the money coming from? Second, who are the people behind the money? Third, what kind of money is it? Now, if I know the people, I would be able to associate easily and authoritatively the kind of money to be expected from such sources.
But I must go farther afield now. In a place with no kind of campaign finance (or political financing) laws or regulations, no oversight of substance, then the money pouring forth is open to every manner of reasonable speculation, none of them on the positive side of what is clean and legal. Because when that kind of money from those kinds of unscrupulous people comes (and is accepted joyfully), there is a price; many of them, in fact. As always, it is best summed up by my American brothers from before: there is no free lunch.
Editor, we have spent long years squabbling over who are the people behind the Marriott and other gargantuan investments in this country. We have gotten nowhere, besides the shrill accusations on the one side, and the petulant denials on the other. Of course, in the interim, our institutions that should stand as the bulwarks of vigilance and for the law, are in shambles. Just the other day, in a case involving money and accountants (what else?), files went missing from the courts. Just the other day, there were reports of a man playing both sides of the field in an effort to thwart the revelations that would have been unearthed about people and money, and who ended up smearing and disgracing himself. The political people who comprised him will move heaven and earth and hell too, to suppress certain kinds of developments from making their way into the public domain. Because then the bottom would fall out of the bucket about transparency and accountability, and matters could lead anywhere and everywhere.
More pointedly, the nasty money and the brutish people behind it would be named and no longer secret. For that is what has permeated here; where this money and character have made powerful men into slaves, dictates the terrain, and rules the roost. Why are those people still hiding?
Editor, do we want more hiding with more of such money and such financial operators (criminals) poisoning whatever little process we have left? Yes, I know that there is little to stop them this time around, but I still ask and table. Now, the big people (PPP and PNC) are reported to have come into the big money with sizable hauls from local kingpins. Interpret that noun and plural however wished. They will have to answer for it; they will have to deliver: more secret deals, more watered down regulation, more lax enforcement.
Along a not dissimilar vein, some of the new people have faded before they have surfaced. My question would have been: who would trust money with some of those, shall we say, citizens? I wouldn’t. What are they going to deliver for the investment? What can they? Since some of them are fading, or are going to be folded into a bigger whole, as a practical matter, there are still those vast amounts of money lying around without owners, without takers, and without political usage. That almost amounts to sacrilege. It is easy, just take it and all will be well; nothing owed, nothing due. Except that nothing is ever so easy; and the real world doesn’t work this way.
Editor, why would anyone give away money without any expectation? And, once there are those types of expectations, then only the worse can be imagined. Think returns like the Berbice Bridge. Think the people who lost out (those outside inner circles) in the Clico debacle. Think all those lovely lawyers and auditors, who know how to collect, sing and dance through the system and make it work for their clients, and move on to the next legal adventure.
In sum, this is what the money of which I speak buy. It buys people, it buys politicians, it buys legal hustlers, it buys professional public servants. And one more thing, it buys all the regrets with which the poor in this country live, while they count their endless tears.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
