OPINION: PPP Gov’t: four years of atrocities and calumnies

Last Updated on Sunday, 4 August 2024, 15:45 by Writer

by GHK Lall

August 2nd marked four years of PPP governance. Four years of PPP government-era financial crimes, indigenous rights violations, media rights violations, citizen rights violation. Obscenity and putridity from the PPP governance cesspit. On August 2, 2020, when President Ali swore his oath, I hoped for the dawning of a new day in Guyana. On the fourth anniversary of the PPP governance that bright new day has not dawned; 1,461 days later, it has been the long, dark, stormy night of the PPP generals, and the day of the living dead for a government that is about decay, defecations, and devastations to country and citizens.

First, there were the North Korean type advertisements. Miles of roads built. Infrastructural monuments delivered. Programs testifying to the thoroughness of a PPP government propagandizing its way out of ugly, financially grisly Guyanese reality. Simply ask Guyanese long on the waiting line, and chronically short in the receiving line that never has their name or number. Behind great political canvases lurk greater political crimes. Pages of propaganda are not enough to overpower four years of governance perversities.

I invite Excellency Ali to tell the stories behind his government’s ads. I deliver some primers. In all that crazed frenzy of building and parceling out goodies, many parcels and goodies ended up with his comrades. Those intimately attached to Guyana’s trough. Frontmen/women, shell companies, phantom operators with bundles of unexplained wealth. Wealth to make Midas drool. The PPP government has refined, reintroduced, then executed, a reverse Robin Hood regime. Take what belongs to poor Guyanese and load and reload the pockets of the cabals of comrades and cronies. The economist in that old slippery Sovietologist, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, would call it the reverse distribution of national assets. All those flabby governance institutions, all those business fronts, all those pieces of real estate, all those hands. The rich get superrich off the people. The have-nots now have less than nothing.

Four years of misery, Excellency Ali. Many buildings, many more Guyanese mouths without, many Guyanese minds wrenched by the torments of needing, not having. Four years of artificial glints, with leaders as hollow logs rolling downhill, others the not-so-invisible hands, mailed fists aimed at self-made Guyanese enemies. In summary, President Ali’s four years is of a monarch that paints his palace in gaudy colors, but with little sustenance inside. When Guyanese ask for something sweet, they get a stone from one who thinks himself a king. Perhaps, King Æthelred the Unready, King John’s tyrannical impulses, or King Kong. Ali, Jagdeo, and Nandlall talk about the return of democracy in Guyana when demagoguery reigns.

Guyanese live with half-truths, crypto truths, inconvenient truths, and the Big Lie of the last 1,461 days. Demagoguery runs amok and the people run for cover. Days of darkness, with Burnham no longer owning. Days of simmering wrath from people left out, behind. The people fear their government, one now mutated into an army of revilers. Thus is the PPP government’s record of the last four years. If anyone seeks the identity of the bosses, look high, look low, look all over. Who unleashes, witch-hunters and headhunters to do hatchet jobs on outspoken citizens? Democracy or demagoguery? It was Excellency Ali, who swore four years ago to deliver transparency and accountability. Guyanese got demagoguery. I always thought that English is a second language for the leader now competing for the master performer mantle.

The PPP government leaders scorn tribunes for the poor, pursuers of truth in government, those pressing for delivery of promises re the people’s patrimony. Where their vast oil patrimony is concerned, Guyanese now coexist with the PPP’s secret society. It is Dr. Ali’s transparency and accountability. To whom: Woods, Washington, Alistair, and Antony? No amount of rhetoric, the propagandistic, can erase, even ease, four years of wretchedness. For four years, one PPP government biggie after another has presented, maintained, a straight face. Crime is so far gone in Guyana that it requires the Government of America to step in and dig out a country refusing to fix itself. Stop and search. Seize and strip. Airport escorts. Legal stripteases. Political dances. ‘I am innocent’ is the cry. Look who is crying, then disappearing, hoping time camouflages. Circle the wagons. Criminalize critics. Communism was knocked off; Stalinism and Hitlerism carry on.

The PPP government resists cleaning its house, prioritizes wiping the environment clean of conscientious objectors. The latter is transparency itself, Excellency Ali. It has been four years of fear for the fainthearted. It has been four years of farces to fix the felonies. It is a record of four years (1,461 days) of wrongdoing, four years of dissembling, and four years of national suffering. Thanks for the memories, President Ali.