Fear of retribution

Dec 23, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths…

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News- SN’s Saturday editorial, “Fear of retribution” (December 21, 2024) was comprehensive and revealing.  It touched so much of my own experiences; I like it.

For the edification of Guyanese, from the editorial page of SN to the pages of life – I personalize it.  The scurrilous nature of the PPP Government, its top people, its dirty people, are all placed in the safekeeping of Guyanese hands.  The objective is not to instil fear, but demonstrate how to stand up to powerful political bullies, shame them to their faces, and when done decide whether to defecate or urinate on them.  The political bullies and cowards in the PPP Government misuse taxpayers’ dollars and human resources to suppress those they declare to be enemies, insurgents to be dealt with, destroyed, if possible.  Don’t be afraid of them.  Stand up to them, stare them down, shut them up.  I have done all three.

The editorial nailed the dread.  Fear of retribution (job, business, contract, relationships, and so on, damaged) ripples across all Guyanese. It is sweeping, but the ground calls for it, so the broom must fit.  Guyanese don’t speak because they fear.  Guyanese are paralyzed by anxieties of consequences should they blow a whistle, speak out of turn, stand against the tide of corruption and leadership sleaze.  Terrence Campbell blew a dog whistle and humans in the PPP Government heard it, rush him.  A sketch of the environment under a government given to the unscrupulous and the malicious.  Now let me share (again) my experiences of retribution with this government.

The government’s leadership and its agents don’t take kindly to what I write, hated me for it.  My crime is speaking against official corruption, taking aim at leadership subterfuges and cover-ups, making Guyanese think.  The latter includes their own people who are disgusted with government’s hypocrisy and deceptions that fly in the face of promised transparency and accountability.  Money is one, oil money and management another.  Retribution came sharply, quickly, and continually.

First, people closely aligned with the brighter lights in the PPP Government and the party apparatus fired off with what they thought would silence once and for all.  Predator.  Forget about low.  Think lice, as in louse.  Retribution’s first broadside didn’t work.  Second, the same PPP Government associated group said I bought into a share of a media outfit for $35 million.  The idea was to infer dark money, some lucrative involvement in corruption, or unexplained wealth.  Because it is me, all three.  Never owned any piece of any business in this country for a dollar, or a million.  Enuff said.  It was the second retribution.  Third, as writings intensified, the Hon Vice President himself decided to dive into the sewer with his own slander.  To justify his nasty handiwork, he smoothed his path: ‘he said I am corrupt.’  That is, me about he.  Bluntly and unsparingly, Dr. Jagdeo is a manipulator or fabricator, at best; at worse, he impaled himself on the jagged shoals of falsehood.  Then, he went for what he believed was the jugular: ‘I hear rumours that he is a predator.’  He hung himself with that distortion, that defamation.  Before that, it was my time in America, my church life here, my presence here.

I hang all of that around his neck and that of His Excellency Ali, especially given that the perps are part of the PPP Executive, and the PPP Government’s cabinet.  I believe that they know, because they are close to the intellectual authors and dirty tricks agents in the fold.  Retribution number three, and from no less a national stalwart as Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, Guyana’s chief policymaker.  It is the kind of malicious and venomous policy that he proudly makes.  I am still writing, still speaking, still taking the same positions that I always have.  When government or opposition do right by the Guyanese people, I commend.  When the opposite happens, they are condemned and scorned.

The last retribution from the PPP Government was hilarious, which I wished were on the money.  From the PPP Government’s retribution centre came the desperate and self-ridiculing.  It was of men dropping off bags of money to me.  I invite them to come again, with a bigger bag, and more than two, since it is Christmas time.  Thinking of all these politically engineered retributive efforts, it is obvious that the PPP Government and its twisted leadership are incapable of tolerating any independent, any objector, in this country.  They know what they have to fear.  So, they try to drive fear into the weak and vulnerable.  Most succumb, a few have a finger to give them.

These are the stark circumstances of PPP Government retributions for utilizing freedom of speech, sharing in public discourse.  Yet President Ali still mumbles about transparency and accountability.  Attorney General Nandlall makes a cartoon character of himself by pontificating about rule of law.  And Vice President Jagdeo oozes with malevolence and retribution against those who denude him of his pretences.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of this newspaper.)

(Fear of retribution)

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• accountability, hard truths, official corruption, PPP Government, Transparency

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