Local political characters straight out of Hollywood’s ‘Front Page’

Dear Editor,

A strange, unprecedented thing is happening here. I watch senior people in the PPP/C government and Coalition opposition operating in perfect harmony. It is how both struggle to make a straight story from what is palpably coiled and crooked with oil. Curious they are.
Both sell themselves as being on the people’s side, while pre-occupied with oil sideshows and side dealings that are part of a grand political conspiracy.

The deceits that they share publicly are seen through, laughed at, and ridiculed. This is how PPP/C and APNU leaders have been, with one trick after another in crafty underhanded unity.
Oil foxes at work, they are.
The PPP/C standard bearer though no laws broken, no corruption. By such reckoning, no laws are broken with what is a de facto third term; so, too, it is the type of corruption definition scorned by accepted dictionaries.
Alongside, there is the Coalition opposition partnering with the PPP/C in Guyana’s unfolding long nights of darkness. The APNU opposition is a study in the benign.
Its honcho says his party knows nothing and settles for stealthy supporting silence in collaboration with the PPP/C on oil.

Silence is golden; the gold that comes from black oil. It is what tars conscience and character into the unrecognizable. Look at them today: no conviction, no conversation of substance or truth on the nation’s oil. I observe political loonies and their sidekicks, and I detect dubious verbal gadgetries about no laws and no knowledge; I discern the cleverly careful.
Already this is the dirty, ugly story of our oil lacking in integrity, with leadership lines devoid of any credibility. If one were to return to that vulgar time and place-Guyana’s Elections 2020-something powerful would strike right in the forehead.

It was that before, during, and after all the squabbling and confronting, very little was said by either the PPP/C or APNU on oil. That is, nothing material, nothing other than some frail, going through motions, positions that were fleeting and extremely cautious. It was if each party, fighting to the death for power, was seeking ways to protect the other.
In this political leadership macabre dance, there is no stepping on each other’s toes by the PPP/C and PNCR, even when it means making themselves into objects of extreme derision.

They pretend at public rivalry and enmity through duplicity. Those are the worst of farces for the best of reasons: black gold by the billions of barrels from blocks secretly arranged for bank loads of booty.
It is only a matter of time before Guyana is Nigeria, Angola, and Venezuela rolled into one, with leaders left to go down that road unquestioned and unchecked.
PPP/C leaders think that they are smarter than the Americans; they will learn the hard way.
In the games played, the PPP/C starts the charade: when Coalition firebrands agitate, the public is informed of land deals and tonsorial criminality; those silence.

And fulfilling its own cunning oil roles, the APNU charges ahead with dual citizenship, public servant representation, and drugs. I wonder who is snorting what.
But it is part of the smokescreen of saying something to appear to be doing something. Meanwhile, in the highest councils of both Government and Opposition, there is mutual agreement: concoct oil cover stories, and evade truth and reality.
It is one big con by con artists: one man claims everything is in order and done the right way. That would be the PPP/C talking head. The other one steps up to say he knows nothing, and he is the supposed leader of something, of what I know not.
If this is not a political brotherhood, an oil Mafia, then there is no god, no truth, and no standard. These leading politicians are slick and smooth, just like Walter Matthau in that vintage Hollywood media farce, “The Front Page”.

What is not of falsity is of lunacy; and what is not of either is of leadership lechers making losers out of all Guyanese. But they do make a spirited effort.
From the PPP/C side: Mesmerize them with a $25,000 handout; mislead them with empty promises; deceive them with political cleverness: charge a man there, fire another over there, and jail another somewhere.

It is the three-card game that prospers from oil money games. I wouldn’t trust those scoundrels to take out the garbage, since they would market it as surefire pandemic cure; and if that fails, then as perfume. On the part of the PNCR-led coalition, there are these troubling signs of the early onset of dementia: amnesia, paranoia, hysteria.
This is the round-the-clock comedy contortions that make the rounds in this country. Some may grin. I do not; I grimace.

GHK Lall