Venality and vendetta: Educating a nation

Letters and more letters are appearing in the newspaper with the cry – let there be no vendetta. The conversation among the middle and upper classes is about the new government developing Guyana and for it to forget about vendetta. Most people, even the working people who are always given to emotional eruptions and want tit for tat, feel the APNU-AFC team should concentrate on development and not be side-tracked with going after the PPP. This is what is meant by vendetta – going after people just because you are in a position to hurt them. Vendetta defined from any angle has no place in society when Governments change. Simply put, vendetta is the chauvinistic mistreatment of others just for the purpose of displaying the possession of authority. The most banal example is the new mandarin saying to one of his subordinates, I will deal with you because your party lost. That subordinate had a right to endorse a party of his choice. If his party loses, why should he be attacked in his office by his new boss? Once the subordinate was qualified for the job he got and he did his job professionally, then if with a change of government he meets with the hand of victimization that is wrong. I don’t anticipate any manifestations of vendetta as the APNU-AFC administration settles down. The story of PPP vendetta against PNC personnel is a long and sad one, and it has stained the legacy of Cheddi Jagan. Adam Harris is yet to be paid monies due after he was removed from the Chronicle in 1992. Scores of Foreign Service Officers were fired, of whom Aubrey Norton is the most famous of that bunch. It is not only that they were dismissed, but monies due were withheld. Two such Foreign Ministry officials took the Jagan Government to court and won – Keith Michael Austin and Dr. Cedric Grant. Dozens of high level officials at Customs and Excise were victims of a witch-hunt by the Jagan Government after 1992. Some of these people still point to the role of Ramon Gaskin as the hatchet man for Jagan. One case I still remember vividly, involves my friend Laurie Bancroft. Bancroft returned with a Masters in Customs Administration when the Jagan Government came into power in 1992. On reporting for duty, Bancroft was peremptorily dismissed. Here was a senior Customs officer removed simply because he was employed with the previous regime. That is vendetta. Most definitely, we have left that political sarcoma behind in 2015. But what about the concept of justice and its delivery to a nation? While avoiding the pathway of vendetta, the APNU-AFC leadership cannot avoid the road to justice. This country was plagued the past fifteen years with the disease of theft of public money. The Guyanese people talked about corruption every day. It became an obsession for this nation. The APNU-AFC has a moral obligation to lay bare the facts of corruption so this country’s citizens can be educated about the financial venalities that swallowed up this land. Some of the most abominable situations need to be researched and the facts given to the Guyanese people. One of the obsessive interests I have in this education project is the Nirmal Rekha case of 2004 at the Ministry of Finance. It wasn’t an outside investigation into Rekha that one can describe as bias. The inquiry was conducted by the Guyana Revenue Authority itself. It found that Rekha signed more than fifty bogus duty-free letters. This columnist has a copy of the findings and it says “over fifty.” How much is over fifty? How can a Permanent Secretary sign over fifty duty-free letters and you put that down to a mistake? To date, Rehka was never removed from his job. He is still there. The Guyanese people were never told what exactly Rekha didn’t do or did but wasn’t wrong. Here is my question. Is a re-look into that enigma a vendetta or a natural search for justice?  One area of interest all Guyanese have, is who were the persons that were compensated after the CLICO collapse when NIS bought CLICO shares in the Berbice Bridge? Many ordinary folks and lower working class people lost out badly in the CLICO collapse. This included my wife’s pension. At the time she worked at GO-Invest and GO-Invest’s pension scheme was administered by CLICO. Is a re-look into this conspiracy a vendetta? If the answer is yes, then I boldly beg to disagree. Vendetta and justice are not related. They have nothing in common. One is based on silly human attitude; the other is a sacred value.