Resign or Remove -Leading to What?

 THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

Resign or Remove -Leading to What?

OPINION BY: GHK LALL 

Calls fly with increasing speed for heads to roll.  Officials must fall for the MV Barima tragedy.  More for the misinformation disseminated.  Less for the losses.  Whether resignation or removal, what difference does it make?  Where’s the positive for the Guyanese people?  They need truth and justice.  Not roping in the MV Barima fallout and continuing with obscuring.  The past is the best teacher.

A senior public servant was sent into the shadows by the PPP Govt.  Who won, who lost?  Certainly, it wasn’t the senior public servant, who may have had wings clipped publicly, but is now a bigger bird.  Another public official, also of considerable rank, was allowed to resign, only for a greater accumulation of power to occur.  This is a true-and-tried PPP tactic that cleverly retreats in the face of advancing public anger, only for the maneuvers at which the party is so skilled to takeover. 

When a man or a woman in the PPP Govt that has erred egregiously is reluctantly withdrawn from the public space, they don’t disappear from the scene.  There’s always a Congress waiting to welcome them, to garland them with more honors.  Hence, what purpose resignation or removal?  A charade in the past for temporary public appeasement, then a rebound later.  Often in the open, and with a finger wagged in the face.  See!  This is the PPP Way.  How it’s done!

As much as Guyanese call for heads to roll, and as much as I endorse, environmental and political reality intrudes into the picture. 

Force one to resign and the majority in the PPP Govt family would have to be sent packing.  Fire one, and many more have to be fired.  This is how one State agency after another has deteriorated and disintegrated.  One resigns or is terminated, and the whole damn governance structure could collapse under it accumulated weights. 

Incompetence pronounced.  Inefficiency extensive.  Corruption – the national political culture.  One aspect is of executives converted to envoys.  The MV Barima cannot be the tip of iceberg.  It’s underwater.  The MV Barima is an indication of the widespread nature of a killer virus, the crippled condition in which Guyana is left.

What’s the remedy?  Guyanese need leaders, ministers, and senior public officials to possess some minimum honesty.  Some decency helps, with class seen and noted.  If there could only be a little self-respect in the corridors of power, it may inspire some authentic respect for the people.  Not some superficial, hypocritical statement cobbled together in the midst of a tragedy (and a mystery absentee) for the sake of putting any something before the nation.  Callout one minister, or push out another, and be ready for the replacement who is likely to be cut from the same cloth as the ousted, maybe even worse.  If that could be contemplated.

Simple people don’t know much about these matters related to resignations and removals.  Humble families are at a loss on how to cope in the terrors and torments of their newly arrived grievous circumstances.  The badly buffeted need to be comforted.  The hollowed out (multiple family members lost) shrink from the thought of how they themselves are going to survive.

Belatedly creeping forward from under the ashes of the MV Barima’s descent to the depth is Excellency Ali.  A ‘full, thorough, and independent investigation’ has been committed to publicly.  If only I could lean on that, run with it.  Guyanese have heard that before. 

To remind: helicopter crash that killed five soldiers; Mahdia Dorm conflagration that incinerated 20 youths.  What the people of Guyana were handed was a PPP Govt style and an Ali standard of ‘full, thorough, and independent investigation’ in both instances.  One cannot be allowed in the daylight (crash report); the other was such a farce that it insulted the living and the dead.

There was a method at work before.  The wheels are already in motion.  Say the right things.  Wait for time to pass.  Give room for memory and interest and passions to fade.  Present an investigation that is a con game.  Then, return to PPP Govt paradise, smug in the satisfaction of another snow job pulled (or dumped) on lost or uncaring Guyanese.