OPINION: Public Accounts C’ttee sabotaged, Guyanese shafted

Last Updated on Thursday, 25 June 2026, 16:37 by Denis Chabrol

By GHK Lall

PAC.  What do I see with Guyana’s Public Accounts Committee?  How its work is probably thwarted?  How much the Guyanese people are being shafted?  When the billions are collected and celebrated, it’s all bugles and blasts of flourishing rhetoric from the PPP Govt.  In essence, the revelries of a cast of thousands guzzling from the national trough.  In contrast, when it’s time for the books to be opened and accounting to be made, the PPP Govt is now all of ventriloquists, their antics, and what is sick.  From real-life, I share with citizens circumstances that they may, unfortunately, know too well.  In trying, in trusting, they have often ended up with the tormenting.  It’s what the PPP is doing with the PAC.

Money is put in a man’s hand.  Trusted and credited.  A worker.  A brother.  A stranger insisting she’s a partner.  (Gender equality in action today).  Include even an employer.  It’s a sad day sometimes, when it is time to present the books, to payback, and to put matters right.  A good lender is a poor thinker.  Except for bankers, of course.  The man or woman that owes an accounting, an explanation, an excuse, or an apology takes flight.  Settles for distance.  No phone calls coming.  None returned.  It is bad debt and baad fren time.  It usually means that something went wrong, is wrong, and is being handled wrong.  By the cheating employer.  By the now lost brother, disappeared worker, and the distant stranger.  I place that in the laps of Guyanese.  I draw one parallel: the PPP Govt and its responses to the all-important PAC.

How communities were enriched, if at all.  Whoever enriched themselves, if any, are left with only one choice -hide.  Make themselves small and scarce.  Whoever cons the Guyanese people through the filing of official missing reports (unavailable, unlocatable), leaves room, for one conclusion only.  There is something to hide.  Six years of spending that raises all manner of alarms (and audit reports) require a world of hiding.  Sidestepping.  Shifting.  Running.  Think of the man that was lent money and can’t be found to settle his debt.  Isn’t that what he does?  Hide?  Buy time.  Come up with one load of baloney after another.  If baloney isn’t understood, try bull, with an S and an H as the next letters attached.  When an employer doesn’t want to pay or account to the NIS and GRA, what does he or she do?  If he is found, he gets hostile.  Or syrupy smooth.  Check on the PPP Govt’s resourcefulness in parliament with getting the PAC off and running, and there is a close relationship.  Like an identical twin.  Perhaps, Pres Ali may wish to share.  He is respectfully invited to say a word.  On these simple truths, hard truths.

I try another approach to highlight more of this now Phantom PAC.  Healthy to assess from another angle.  If the PPP Govt had been clean, done right, with six years of budget billions, there would be no PAC absences.  There would always be a PAC quorum to get its business done.  Because there would be a six-year record over which to be proud.  Because it would be open door, and open conversation, at the PAC.  No session missed.  For then, there would be the work of the PAC to testify to how well the PPP Govt served as a faithful and trusted steward of the Guyanese people billions.  All six years of Audit Office work would be accelerated forward.  So that the accolades could pour in, so that the cries of chronic PPP corruption would be put to rest.  No question.  No contest.  No test left.  Now that would be a triumphant day.  Nothing would please me more than to laud Drs. Ali, Jagdeo, Singh and hail them and their teams in two words.  WELL DONE!  But when the PAC is forced to operate as though incest happened, then Guyanese get to see the gymnastics and masquerades that they see, absorb.