Jan.15,2018.
This column concludes my series of looking back at Guyana in 2017. I went through my files of 362 columns for last year, and the enormity of the stuff is daunting. An ocean of negatives swamped Guyana. It becomes boring to keep lamenting on wrong things that should not have happened but did occur.
Going through the list, one has to prioritise.
I would say the exclamations of rape in parliament last year stand out in my mind. That incident has few parallels in the past five years in Guyana. That parliamentarians in front of the camera could be shouting rape, rape, rape, could only be described as one of the most revolting occurrences in the history of the National Assembly in Guyana.One must note this wasn’t an altercation between parliamentarians. Such ill conduct has taken place in many parliaments around the world. It wasn’t a case of bad manners. One recalls a Republican Congressman, Joe Wilson, shouting at President Obama as he delivered the State of the Union address; “You lie.” But for serving legislators to be shouting rape, rape, rape in a statutory sitting of a country’s parliament is unheard of in modern times.
This unsavory incident was part of a disgraceful display in which PPP legislator, Priya Manickchand, lied in telling the press that a police officer cuffed her in her stomach. As I went through the contents of 2017, for some reason this infamy stood out in my mind.
And as I reflect on it as my finger (finger, singular; I type with one finger) moves on the keyboard of my computer, it depresses me to know that in 2017 that the people who created this depravity in the country’s legislature are out there engaged in the politics of persuasion – asking Guyanese to put them in office once more; in addition to the twenty-three years that they had.
Here is why the thought is frightening. After the abomination in Parliament last year in which Manickchand featured, she was part of the delegation of the opposition leader who met the president to discuss the conformation of the applicant for Chancellor of the Judiciary. You would think that protocol would have dictated that it was too early to put Manickchand in the limelight. But that is the nature of Bharrat Jagdeo. This is a man who has no concern for the elegancies of decent politics.
2017 was a sad year not because of the many wrong things that happened but because of the persistence of the activism of the PPP. It was a year in which the ruling coalition made too many mistakes and those crucial misdirections played into the hands of the philistine in the PPP. If one did a serious content-analysis of the remarks of the SOCU consultant, Dr. Sam Sittlington, one can detect a Freudian disappointment that more was not done on the anti-corruption front in 2017. This for me was one of the colossal failures of 2017.
There is a West Indian slang word that originated from Trinidad called “pampasett”. It means to show off in a brazen way though you have nothing to really show off about. In 2017, the PPP leaders “pampasett” themselves all over Guyana because the government failed to bring charges against many of them for huge acts of corruption from 1999 to 2015.It will stun the average human in any part of the world to know how much went missing, how much was hijacked, how much was stolen in the reign of Jagdeo and Ramotar. And in 2017 we saw about five persons charged; none of whom were heavyweights in the PPP leadership. One would have thought that in 2017, it would have been the year of poetic justice, that those who stole money would have been paraded in front of the world.
One guy, as I mentioned, in one of my reviews of 2017, rented out the top level of the New Thriving Restaurant for his wedding reception.Dr. Sittlington is back and one hopes that he brings a new approach to the investigation of stolen money during the regimes of Jagdeo and Ramotar.Imagine in 2017, men and women who abused the Guyanese people for fifteen years, who stole money that could have gone into bettering our delivery of health care and education, were crying rape, rape, rape in parliament when there was no such act.
Not only were they not scared of the consequences of the morbid venalities when they were in power but had the temerity to desecrate parliament. In 2017, there was no other country like Guyana.
