A hundred days of heaven or pending hell

Dear Editor,

As expected, there were heralds accentuating positives, and the dirty tricksters, for whom the PPP government could do no right.  My weighing of selected areas, personally paramount, left with a share of both.  I proceed in a measured manner mustered.

There is the unity wagon.  It is all words meaning nothing, a clinical exercise in public politeness, but beyond, a teeming crab barrel housing rancour and lasting divisions.  I point to the ongoing public service bludgeoning; I detect sugar payback.

At my age, and considering national defences, the pandemic is up there.  I understand the tough choice of balancing safety and economy.  But I think the government erred seriously with this.  It goes against the relentless tide of numbers and deaths, the latter small, to implement actions that promise peril.  Curfew compression and school reopening remove the frail chains restraining a frighteningly vicious virus.  I appreciate the clarity of the Hon Health Minister and ministry, on pandemic handling government stands unmasked; it has exposed us.  I cannot vaccinate myself against that reality.

In terms of relief, I laud the PPP government: COVID-19 cash, less VAT, water, energy and pension eases; citizens get a timely breather, especially elders.  I taint not those pluses, and the significant budgetary spending programmes, by asking about source of funds or borrowings or running up deficits.  Let us be genteel today, and enjoy, which is what Christmas introduces.

Regarding America, oh! America.  I am all for being about America, but I go beyond the glitter and pomp, and ask this: do we really know what we are doing, what we have done?  Do shortsighted PPP leaders, dangerously hungry for power, know what they did?  The costs will be high.  Russia and China, places I do not hold dear, cannot be pleased.  Since they have multibillion-dollar investments at stake in Venezuela, I am pressed to see either of them standing by passively, idly; that is ominous for us.  The Latin American and oil chessboards are too meaningful to be removed from their intermediate and long-term strategic portfolios.  This cannot be an abstraction, for the simple reason that we are in the middle.  I think the PPP’s reborn zeal for the vaunted American Way has left it naked, made us vulnerable.

Continuing with foreign relations, I notice that CARICOM is nonexistent these days.  I remember it is around whenever there is occasional message.  Though owed greatly, it is all but ignored now.  I think the PPP brass errs terribly with CARICOM.  As said, in taking the full American plunge, we have no backstop.  Neither spiritual nor verbal.  I recall how pivotal CARICOM was in the count, how much hinged on where it would conclude.  If it had done otherwise, I tender that the PPP would have been nowhere, because the PNC then had its needed dispensation, its cover story.  Today CARICOM fades in Guyana’s political considerations and constellation.  Reminds me of fair-weather friends.

For another favourite I point to rules and regulations and say that His Excellency is a man of his word.  Quietly, without letup, what is not gone is going, as he had sworn.  The results, largely unknown, will surface.  Already, within the first 100 days, I notice that a world class export has gleefully returned in the form of 11 tons of cocaine.  Man! That is a work of art, a testimony to the kind of culture of PPP regimes, no matter the leader.  If I am a certain kind of businessperson, this is heaven.

Now on the oil, I am not fooled by the Hon. Vice President’s rant at the PNC doing nothing with oil in five years.  He has a point; but more pointedly, that is part of the nation’s political comedy, the charade that misleads.  The VP’s broadside is part of the cruel games played on backward Guyanese who fall for them.  It is a case of having to say something sharp publicly, but secretly, they are unified on oil. Oil compelled shared governance between the PPP and PNC, which is why both are so muted; the PNC in its time, the PPP now.  The empty blustering is intended to deceive further.  A hundred days of heaven or pending hell.  Make a choice.  I must go.

Yours faithfully,

GHK Lall