forensic audit of incestuousness

The PPP will need in the coming weeks, a replacement weapon for its dried up ammunition of rigged election. If the Americans had sided with the PPP, its supporters would have rallied to the PPP cause. But once PPP church-goers know that the US is behind the Granger administration and the Americans are fed up with the PPP’s false cries about the election results, that bandwagon will not survive too long on the road. Middle class parishioners of the PPP are not too happy with American castigations of the PPP as bad losers. It makes them feel personally uncomfortable. Middle class politicians, like the rest of the population of Guyana, see the US as essential to Guyana’s future.       And the Americans have been pellucid about the need for the country to move on. Perhaps this explains the open dissent of Dr. Vindhya Persaud and Clinton Urling. Urling moves around the diplomatic cocktail circuit and will want to avoid American annoyance at him for his embrace of a party that is a sour and sore loser. There is no doubt that the rigged election vehicle will be rolled up in the garage and a new car will emerge. That has already happened. It is the cry of witch-hunt. This new salvo has far more chances of hitting its target than the worn-out clique of fraudulent elections. Whereas the PPP cannot supply its constituencies with proof that it was cheated in the 2015 poll, it can actually go into the countryside and name names of PPP mandarins who were dismissed. These dismissals represent poetic justice and should continue, but it gives the PPP something to cry about. The question is what strategy the coalition government will use to counter the forthcoming terminations. The answer is a forensic audit of incestuousness. In bringing about the end of the ubiquity of PPP personnel inside the nerve-centre of the total public sphere, the new government would achieve two goals – return the public sphere to the traditional neutral, professional public servant. Secondly, it would end what must be the most morbid desecration of the civil service in the English-speaking Caribbean – the ubiquity of incestuousness in Guyana under the PPP Government 1992 -2015. It was a simple, psychological act inside the collective mind of the hierarchy of the PPP when it filled its candidates’ list with sons, daughters, brothers, cousins and other family connections. If the family trees were all over the public sector, it was a natural thing to put them on the list of candidates. The election has come and gone, and though it would be useful to remind the Guyanese people of the incestuousness of the PPP list of contestants, a more useful and valued approach for the new government would be the exposure of the penetration of the family trees to the point where every conceivable PPP first and second tier leader had a relative high up in the public sector. Let me repeat what the current Finance Minister, Winston Jordan, told me at the arrival lounge of the airport. While we were both waiting for our people, he said there were more than eighty foreign paid jobs in the public sector and all were from a particular ethnic group with PPP connections. He suggested I investigate. I did. I found that one of my students who did philosophy with me at UG for her degree in International Relations, was one of those persons Winston Jordan mentioned. She had no formal training in agriculture but took a job as an agricultural extension officer, earning $800,000 per month, paid by a multilateral institution. Her father is very close to the PPP. Tragically, she died on the job just before the elections when her car ran off an unstable bridge into a ravine in the interior. My wife was sad because she did a few months at GO-Invest with her Industrial Relations degree and got to know my wife well. She invited us to her wedding. She was too young to die, but incestuous politics claimed her life. I must have mentioned the story of Elvin Mc David’s wife twice in these columns when I wrote on the role of incestuousness in the PPP Government. Mc David had an uncanny influence on President Burnham which made him the de facto second in charge. I remember waiting for the bus at Camp and Lamaha Streets, outside Lee Funeral Parlour, and there waiting for the bus, too, was Mc David’s wife, an ordinary teacher at St. Rose’s High School. A forensic audit of PPP incestuousness would reveal a tsunami of shocking facts both in terms of employment and scholarship to top class universities.