By Stabroek News
Dear Editor,
US lobbying firm, Continental Strategy LLC (lobbyist), now of Tweet infamy, is working for some entity. The president said that his PPP Government had nothing to do with the lobbyist’s smearing of Mohamed, the political newcomer. Guyanese have learned the bitter way of how much confidence they can place in the president’s word, spoken or written. I know where I am. I know some other things, too.
When a relationship-consulting, advisory, public executioner-is sealed, there is a process usually followed. This is the plan, how it will be implemented. There is buy-in, signoff, proceeding. But in the tweeting about the other Mohamed, Guyanese are encouraged to believe that the lobbyist acted on its own, and the PPP Government’s hands are clean. Considering the history of this president and this government, this is an inseparable aspect of the explosion that showers with doubts, introduces chaos. Create space, give room, and fill the vacuum with trash and balderdash. Guyana has three such champions, and they occupy high places in the PPP Government. Oh, the web, and yes, the tangles….
Since the government has no ownership of what the US lobbyist did, then it must be the usual scapegoat, the PNC. Since the PNC is implausible, then that leaves Nicolas Maduro himself as the crafty operator in this tweet caper. Or, some Guyana private sector member with US$300,000 spare change lying around. This may sound ludicrous, but here is a test for Guyana’s smartest. Who knows who’s working for whom in Guyana anymore? Whose side they are on? Which group has that kind of money to throw around so cavalierly? Or, what dirty tricks are next in line? Try the power of commonsense. Try this also: even if the PNC had the money, it wouldn’t: returns too low. Since the president, an upstanding citizen without equal, said that it’s not his PPP government that should be the end of the story. Hold horses.
The president has accumulated an impressive record of merely casual flirtations with standards that others accept as clear, and with no fuzziness around the edges. He has his own standards, which usually introduce a considerable degree of skepticism in what he shares. Who is paying Continental Strategy US$50,000 a month? Whatever its business, Guyanese can be assured of one thing. Charity is out. So that simple question remains: who engaged and oversees the lobbyist’s work product(s)?
Now, I overlook the constitutional rights of the contender now violated, since that is so normal in today’s Guyana. I wave away presidential reassurances, since those are largely useless. Seen and heard before. In the same place as before. Nowhere that is comforting. Whoever in Guyana wants to lean on the president’s reassurances can do so. They should be aware, though, that there is swamp of ‘suck-sand’ underneath whatever he puts out waiting to swallow them up scalp, shoulders, and shoe. Slandering a Guyanese as a Maduro puppet (and plant) is going too deep, with the dirty tricks and games. Hollering at a journalist makes the president look small, desperate. Switching the conversation to sanctions doesn’t help ease the pressure on either the president or the government. In fact, it makes the president look dodgy, a man with something to hide, as though he is trying to wiggle his way out of a tight corner. He failed.
In my estimation, what this “pro-Maduro puppet” whodunit, and the president’s less than persuasive answer(s), do is add another memo to local headman’s bulky file: Missing in action is written on the front. And lacking in substance in red letters is scrawled across the flip side. I have always said that live in the fast lane where certain basic human conditions (and practices) are concerned, and it’s only a matter of time before there’s running off the road due to an unforeseen curve. Separately, instead of late August, those foreign elections observers should be here in early July. I grapple with how anyone can call what is going on here ‘free and fair’ when Mohamed the Newcomer is being attacked from Wakenaam to Washington. The candidate isn’t free to move, but he is not a threat. He is not free to speak, but US$50,000 per month is spent to shut him up and put him out of the political business. Somebody is whistling past the graveyard, and it’s not me. The trouble for the PPP is that when it thinks it has moved past the graveyard, that same graveyard is moving along smartly by its side. Just like it did in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Yeah, it’s the haunted existence that some fine fellows live with, those cavorting in red. The president should clean up his act, the city can take care of itself.