Jul 14, 2016 Source

It is hard in this country to live with the politicians from the PPP that administered the power of policy-making for Guyana for about 23 years.
It is difficult to live in this country with them and have to put up with their semantic morbidities that come to you from the newspapers and on television. When you read what they write and what comes out of their mouths on television, then the only reaction that you can generate is anger. Most of the times, you cannot believe what they write or speak. I was literally overflowing with anger when I read Hydar Ally denouncing political interference at the University of Guyana, and the only example he could have offered is the 1974 abrogation of Walter Rodney’s appointment by the then PNC Government. This was coming from one of the leaders of the PPP Government that literally reduced UG to a political football. As I write, the Pro-Chancellor of the University is Bibi Shadick, so appointed when she was a PPP Parliamentarian.
She succeeded Dr. Prem Misir, appointed when he was Press Liaison Officer in the Office of the President and the Chairman of the PPP Prashad Nagar group.
Surely, when Mr. Ally was writing a little bit of decency should have been present. Not much but just a little bit. But none was. Donald Ramotar in a published letter to this newspaper waxed lyrical about Kwame McCoy. McCoy reminds you of the seventies when certain thugs were overjoyed to physically hurt opposition activists.
This column was motivated by a few words I heard on the television as I was about to leave my home. I rushed out to get to Kaieteur News to type this article for reasons all readers would know. And as I reached the door, I heard Anil Nandlall on a panel discussion saying that Guyana has a dysfunctional political system.
This is what I mean by living with exasperation in Guyana with PPP leaders.
Just how a stranger wouldn’t know that when Hydar Ally wrote his denunciation of political interference at UG, he was the PPP’s point man on the UG Council for ten years ensuring PPP’s domination there, a stranger would not know that Anil Nandlall was a powerful policy-maker in a government that controlled Guyana for twenty three years.
What did PPP leaders do in those twenty three years about confronting and eradicating Guyana’s dysfunctional anatomy?
On the contrary, the PPP’s reign witnessed the most sickening prolongation of that dysfunctional system. The PPP inherited severe anachronistic impulses from the previous two PNC Governments but instead of removing those severities, they ignored them thus prolonging the aberration that Guyana has become under the previous government and under the PPP
Take the draconian penalties for small amounts of marijuana. Mr. Nandlall as Attorney-General never touched that legal backwardness. Take the Administration of Justice Act of 1979. If anything is dysfunctional in nature, it is that law. It allows trial by the Magistracy for horrible crimes that should be before High Court Judges. Under the Administration of Justice Act, a Magistrate cannot go beyond a certain time frame for allocating jail time. The High Court has no such restriction.
This country just witnessed the conviction of men who invaded the home of the Land Court judge, beat her and her husband so terribly that the husband lost one of his eyes and such a case went before a Magistrate
We have a former Minister charged with fraud involving a sum of over 600 million dollars and she is in front a Magistrate. If convicted, the Magistrate cannot go beyond ten years of imprisonment for one count. In the High Court, such a person could end up serving thirty years. In which country could a former Minister be charged for such an amount and is placed before a Magistrate rather than a Judge and Jury? These are the dysfunctional parts of Guyana’s biology that PPP leaders refused to touch
Perhaps the moral glaring, immoral example of how Mr. Nandlall’s Government perpetuated Guyana’s broken down political architecture was the quarrel over the site for the 1823 Slave Rebellion Monument. If Guyana is near the precipice, the PPP pushed it there. African Guyanese wanted the monument to be erected where the slaves were executed. The location was none of the Government’s business. This was a matter for the African Guyanese descendants of those murdered slaves. The PPP arbitrarily assigned the monument to the old, obscured seawall road near to Vlissengen Road in a vile, contemptuous rebuff of the desire of African groups.
Guyana remains dysfunctional because the PPP from 1992 to May 2015 wanted it to be like that.