WHAT a revealing period for high hypocrisy in this nation of Guyana, with the Alliance For Change (AFC) party once again the epicentre of this well known characteristic that often distinguishes genuine leaders from opportunists.
It is very difficult to comprehend a party that promised so much – a new kind of political morality, to observe some of its most prominent members, its standard bearers to be more specific, becoming tarnished with serious ethical violations.
Beginning with Mr. Moses Nagamotoo, who led himself out of a party that nurtured his political growth and development, to the point where he became cabinet minister in its 1992 administration. This gentleman, now a member of the AFC, crusaded on the well worn-out accusation of corruption, principally directed against the National Industrial & Commercial Investments Limited (NICIL).
In fact, he was among his party’s chief chorus leaders who lambasted the nation’s Privatisation Unit, only for him to be exposed as having been retained as one of this important institution’s attorneys!
It was indeed a shocker, for it was clearly a conflict of interest, of which his party and executive would have been fully aware. How duplicitous it was for him to criticise an institution’s manner of conducting the state’s business, the very institution on whose behalf he functioned legally!
But the dust, rather than being settled on this most contradictory of cases, has again blown up, exposing two other damning issues – one, a conflict of interest, and the other, a most serious case of ethical and moral violations, that has thrown egg full into the face of prominent attorney Mr. Nigel Hughes, who is also chairman of the AFC.
Since the detail of the first issue as it pertains to Mr. Hughes and his party is well known, there will be no need for repeat.
Absolutely, it was to Mr. Hughes’s credit that he had recused himself from his party’s public pronouncements and criticisms on the Amaila Falls Hydro project, knowing that he had been the company secretary of the Amaila Falls Hydro Company Inc. Yet, this was definitely a conflict of interest, since the party in which he was a core leader had voiced a position against his company’s project.
Such silence was not enough, for even a secondary school student into basic law studies, would have known that Hughes ought to have resigned from his party the moment its position became known on the project. Why wait until public disclosure, before quitting the party? For a citizen of Mr. Hughes’s pedigree, this is shocking, and a clear insult to the public, particularly his initial defence that it was not a conflict of interest, only to have a complete volte face filled with apologies, admitting that it had been such. Who was he fooling?
Then how does this same attorney not remember that a former client was the foreman of a jury, empanelled to sit in a just concluded high-profile case, and that this absolutely necessitated that he as defence attorney immediately made this known, so that the foreman would have been excluded from the selection process? This is very astonishing, to say the least, and does bring the legal profession into disrepute. What a sad day for the local Bar! It is a grave offence, so much so, that the former jury foreman has been given a life ban from this important civic obligation. But we should now ask about this attorney’s role, notwithstanding his defence of not being able to recall all his clients!
What these two examples epitomise is the classic case of time-honoured principles being deliberately trampled on and thrown unto the garbage heap. Material considerations, other than moral and ethical instances, took precedence. And it all comes from a party that had made the entire nation believe that it was the paragon of the purest political virtue and dispensation. These are but two significant examples of this party’s growing list of personal conduct, matters that make nonsense of its claim to being different.
What a horrible contradiction of this new morality that the AFC is!
It is very difficult to comprehend a party that promised so much – a new kind of political morality, to observe some of its most prominent members, its standard bearers to be more specific, becoming tarnished with serious ethical violations.
Beginning with Mr. Moses Nagamotoo, who led himself out of a party that nurtured his political growth and development, to the point where he became cabinet minister in its 1992 administration. This gentleman, now a member of the AFC, crusaded on the well worn-out accusation of corruption, principally directed against the National Industrial & Commercial Investments Limited (NICIL).
In fact, he was among his party’s chief chorus leaders who lambasted the nation’s Privatisation Unit, only for him to be exposed as having been retained as one of this important institution’s attorneys!
It was indeed a shocker, for it was clearly a conflict of interest, of which his party and executive would have been fully aware. How duplicitous it was for him to criticise an institution’s manner of conducting the state’s business, the very institution on whose behalf he functioned legally!
But the dust, rather than being settled on this most contradictory of cases, has again blown up, exposing two other damning issues – one, a conflict of interest, and the other, a most serious case of ethical and moral violations, that has thrown egg full into the face of prominent attorney Mr. Nigel Hughes, who is also chairman of the AFC.
Since the detail of the first issue as it pertains to Mr. Hughes and his party is well known, there will be no need for repeat.
Absolutely, it was to Mr. Hughes’s credit that he had recused himself from his party’s public pronouncements and criticisms on the Amaila Falls Hydro project, knowing that he had been the company secretary of the Amaila Falls Hydro Company Inc. Yet, this was definitely a conflict of interest, since the party in which he was a core leader had voiced a position against his company’s project.
Such silence was not enough, for even a secondary school student into basic law studies, would have known that Hughes ought to have resigned from his party the moment its position became known on the project. Why wait until public disclosure, before quitting the party? For a citizen of Mr. Hughes’s pedigree, this is shocking, and a clear insult to the public, particularly his initial defence that it was not a conflict of interest, only to have a complete volte face filled with apologies, admitting that it had been such. Who was he fooling?
Then how does this same attorney not remember that a former client was the foreman of a jury, empanelled to sit in a just concluded high-profile case, and that this absolutely necessitated that he as defence attorney immediately made this known, so that the foreman would have been excluded from the selection process? This is very astonishing, to say the least, and does bring the legal profession into disrepute. What a sad day for the local Bar! It is a grave offence, so much so, that the former jury foreman has been given a life ban from this important civic obligation. But we should now ask about this attorney’s role, notwithstanding his defence of not being able to recall all his clients!
What these two examples epitomise is the classic case of time-honoured principles being deliberately trampled on and thrown unto the garbage heap. Material considerations, other than moral and ethical instances, took precedence. And it all comes from a party that had made the entire nation believe that it was the paragon of the purest political virtue and dispensation. These are but two significant examples of this party’s growing list of personal conduct, matters that make nonsense of its claim to being different.
What a horrible contradiction of this new morality that the AFC is!
