OPINION: Liz Truss: look at who ousted her; where are the PPP equivalents?

Last Updated on Friday, 21 October 2022, 8:35 by Denis Chabrol

By GHK Lall

British Prime Minister, Liz Truss, is now history.  Her 6-week tenure was sad, bad, and mad history.  I say that all the talk of U-turn fades into insignificance by how she overturned herself, and ended up being thrown out on her head.  As always, I look at developments elsewhere, and ask myself: why not here?  Why don’t we have people of the caliber that could standup and against a sitting Prime Minister (the equivalents), and say enough, and begone?  I mean, considering her recent arrival and her belated corrective actions, limited in themselves, the thinking is that then PM Truss would have been given a bit more space, and a wide pass.  She got neither from her own people, and it tells each one of us Guyanese of how such things are wrong here, and that we have the wrong people around in the highest and most sensitive places in this country.

In quick order, we know about Truss’s giving the rich a tax break, helping the oil companies with a free ride in a time of windfall profits, and not doing enough for the ordinary British people.  The latter were feeling the pain from trying to cope with inflation, and other pressures, and needed every assistance, any kind of material ease, that could be had from government.  Contender Truss for the PM’s role promised much.  But PM Truss walked back what she said was going to be done under her leadership.  Yes, she went against the financial markets (Guyana Governments have private sector), and paid a price for her lack of political wisdom, her failure to read the tensions and troubles that could result from her actions.  But, I think her biggest misread and misjudgment was not dealing cleanly with the national constituency, not delivering as expected, as promised.

Former PM Truss’s support base (the Conservative Party) of parliamentarians in the House of Commons have voters to whom they answer, and they were hearing the alarms and cries.  Things got so bad in Liz Truss’s six-weeks interval of leadership slides, upheavals, and reversals that even venerable members of the House of Lords were speaking out publicly against her decisions and actions.  What made matters still worse was that the critical members of the British peerage, who spoke critically of PM Truss were diehard, rock-ribbed Conservatives.  In the tersest, tightest description: her own turned against her, and spoke out against the Prime Minister and pushed her out from 10 Downing Street.

Now, the question may be asked: what does any of this have to do with Guyana, or our way of life all the way down here?  I think that that is fair, and I now elaborate how I see this fitting into the local context.

We have the PPP Government in power, and it is now obvious that there is leadership failure at the highest levels.  In the first instance, the President, Vice President, and ranking ministers were very vocal in denouncing the 2016 oil contract that Guyana lives with in partnership with Exxon.  There are PPP Members of Parliament who are competent enough to know that what they condemned before is an abomination and insult to Guyana, but they have no problems with their leaders sticking with it, doing nothing to force Exxon’s hand.  In fact, a quartet of PPP MPs went above and beyond to attack their fellow Guyanese and to defend where the foreigners (Exxon et al) were falling short.  Instead of Guyanese MPs pressing and pushing their leaders to bring about needed enhancements, they are content to be the best version of ‘all for one’ and ‘one for all.’  I look for men and women of high honor, higher principle, and the highest patriotism, and I come up emptyhanded.  Not one?  Not one dissident PPP MP here?  Like they have in the rebellious Conservative Party in England, and like Liz Truss came to rue for her weaknesses and ineptitude?  Where are the pastors and pandits and other pious in parliament?  How about the princes of learning?  Surely, there must be one?

Next, there is a highly touted Wales gas-to-shore (GTS) project that would be the costliest undertaking to date by this poor country.  Nobody really has the full and accurate story of the financial foundations for this GTS project, and its continued benefits to energy-starved Guyanese, desperate for affordable and reliable electricity.  A number of variables, all against the original estimates advanced by the Hon Vice President reduces, if not eliminates, what he had placed before the nation, and which looked and sounded encouraging when first unveiled.

I am certain that there are PPP MPs who can count better than I can, and who also discern that there is an insufficiency of information and detail from the Vice President, relative to the Wales GTE.  Yet it is as if they are braindead or dead to all developments, or they are severely handicapped in terms of analyzing and interpreting what is now before them, and then speaking out against it.  That is, unless the complete basis of the Vice President’s ‘must have’ US$2B GTE project is shared with Guyanese.  It must be that what is presented makes sense, as in making a material difference in the lives of Guyanese, or it cannot stand.  Again, I ask this: what happened to the lawyers, and doctors, the other learned, the religious people on the PPP’s side of the aisle in Guyana’s National Assembly?

I am looking for one (only one) PPP MP to stand up, like one of those Conservative Party MPs in the Commons, and say that he or she has a problem.  A problem with the Exxon contract, and that meaningful change must come now.  A problem with the Wales GTE, and that we must know all there is to know now, or that it be scrapped.  It would speak honorably of that one PPP MP (or more of them, if they can be found) who step out, and articulate concerns with the claims of our Chinese Cde. Su, with the depth of their leaders (plural) integrity and honesty.  And that he or she has had enough, and cannot and will not be a part of any such situations anymore.

Where are those PPP MPs?  I think the better question is whether we have any of them at all….