Grab for power in Guyana the world must condemn
I keep reading about the points both sides have in the crisis of the no confidence vote (NCM). Even if both sides have legitimate arguments, this columnist finds two advancements from the government and its supporters so asinine that they expose the government and supporters as power grabbers.
The first one is the foreign citizenship of Charrandass Persaud. The polemic of the PNC and AFC is intellectually so bankrupt that it reduces Guyana to a joke in the eyes of the world. Here is that argument. Under the constitution, you cannot owe allegiance to a foreign country.
Persaud is a citizen of Canada therefore he was legally disqualified from voting. This sounds good. But it becomes rotten egg as the counter argument begins.
When did leaders in the PNC and AFC discover that foreign citizens sit as Guyanese MPs and thus cannot vote? Not in 2015 when they won Parliament. Not with the 2016, 2017, 2018 budgets; not with the oil and gas legislation, only at the end of December 2018, when Persaud voted for the NCM.
Really! Are rational minds going to accept this? Do rational minds not see the deviousness on this adumbration?
Now if Persaud could not vote for the NCM because he has foreign citizenship, does his vote for past budgets and past Bills stand? If the court rules in the government’s favour then the NCM is invalid. But is this government telling the world that it will accept Persaud was at fault on one issue only – the NCM? Is the government saying it will live with all the Bills that were passed up to December 2018 in which Persaud sided with the government?
If that is so, then morality has no place in life and the world.
Normal humans will be inclined to say that AFC and the PNC are not people worthy to be reelected because they have no moral guidance in their approach to the administration of a country. If the PNC and AFC win the court case based on Persaud’s foreign status and decides to continue in government without cancelling all the other motions and Bills that Persaud helped to bring into reality then I say such a group of politicians should not be reelected.
Next is the bribery factor. This is bizarre, macabre, surreal, theatrical. The bribery dimension of the Charrandass NCM vote has exposed the foolish people in the PNC and AFC and has given the PPP a lifeline that will serve them handsomely in the forthcoming elections.
Let’s go back to fifteen years of corruption under Jagdeo and Ramotar. As a long serving media operative, I have snippets of evidence of corruption by PPP ministers.
I am still at a loss to find out why a letter-writer by the name of GHK Lall finds the Kaieteur News such a gutter newspaper (must be personal) when in the context of Caribbean newspapers, the KN stands out as one of the most phenomenal journalistic investigators of governmental corruption. KN brought out a mountain of corruptibility by the presidencies of Jagdeo and Ramotar.
The AFC, in particular, secured electoral success with its denunciation of kleptocracy under Jagdeo and Ramotar. One man had billions of dollars in his possession and his only source of business income was selling phone cards. One man became a minister and overnight he had a huge mansion and swimming pool on West Coast.
Three years after APNU+AFC came to power, its anti-corruption arm, SARA, is yet to galvanize the nation about its discoveries. A former minister, Westford, was tried and found not guilty. Nizam Hassan of the Rice Board was tried and found not guilty. But guess who is guilty of corruption? Charrandass Persaud. And guess how long it took for the government to investigate and find evidence of the conspiracy – literally days. Certainly not more than ten days.
Here is what the PPP is going to do when the election campaign begins. It will tell its supporters that after fifteen years in power the APNU+AFC regime cannot bring solid evidence of corruption but in days they found proof of Persaud being bribed.
The PPP campaigners will tell listeners at their meetings that there was never any corruption under Jagdeo and Ramotar because if they could find evidence of financial nastiness against Persaud within days why they could not find financial stench after three and a half years of investigating the PPP regime.
The more the leaders of the PNC and AFC invoke asinine reasons for rejecting the NCM, the more they are exposing their power drunk mentality. The government’s rejection of the NCM in the opinion of this columnist is a grab for power which is endangering the fabric of this country.
