Dear Editor,

I THANK you for publishing my letter advocating for the revitalization of the Bank of Guyana. Permit a brief response to Vishnu Bisram, published in another section of the media on Sept 25th. This gentleman has plagued the letters’ columns of the local press with specious polls, analyses, and fabrications of reality that have served to perpetuate ethnic insecurities and ignorance of the masses through the spread of misinformation.

Here, again, Bisram has obviously been secured to serve as an apologist and beggar to the masses for the PPP. He may, of course, be forgiven for his ignorance about economics, but his deliberate misrepresentation of facts generally is something which should not be excused or encouraged.

In summary, I am confident that readers can easily discern for themselves the numerous inaccuracies contained in Bisram’s letter, so I shall refrain from these. In response to his questions on the current governor’s qualification as an able and effective governor, I wish to state categorically that my recommendation of Dr. Terence Smith as the Bank’s new Governor was not because I consider the current Governor a political appointee.

I invite Bisram and interested sections of the media to approach Dr. Ganga himself for copies of memoranda which detail allegations of unprofessionalism which make him unsuitable to serve as Governor of the Bank of Guyana.

The recent cover for these was dated on or around January 07th, 2016 and addressed to His Excellency, President Granger. They contained information filed originally with the then Minister of Finance in 2008 and copied to the then President, the late L. T. Williams, Governor of the Bank of Guyana at the time; and Dr. Ganga himself, Deputy Governor at the time. These detail the mess Ganga made of the Bank’s monetary policy in 2007, and his sordid management style which he used to dismember the Bank’s Research Department.

The contents of the initial cover to the former Minister of Finance may be found in the comments section to the letter on the Bank of Guyana in Stabroek News published Sept 23/16. A thorough formal investigation will reveal much more.

In respect to Bisram’s assertion of economic growth under the stewardship of Ganga, he is encouraged to be more cautious in interpreting economic statistics in general. The growth of which Bisram speaks includes economic activities supported by the narcotics trade; money laundering; wilful overt government corruption, including the close to US$40 million in expenditures on the Amaila Falls road, overpriced contracts like the CJIA affair, and output from companies like Bai Shan Lin, which facilitated the plunder of Guyana’s natural resources and was accompanied by tremendous losses in revenues to Central Government through the granting of fiscally imprudent concessions.

These latter activities were in fact propaganda, a great show of a buoyant, vibrant economy which yielded little or nothing for Guyana’s economy in welfare terms, while the PPP and its cronies continued to bleed Central Government.

The point here is that the so-called economic growth to which Bisram refers was a sham. After two decades of PPP administration, even with Ganga at the Bank of Guyana for the last decade or so, there is no official record on unemployment in Guyana, with youth unemployment placed at around 40 per cent for more than a decade by a Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) study released in May of last year. This is because that would expose the PPP’s absolute failure and mismanagement of the Guyana economy.

But this is not to infer that Ganga was responsible for the PPP’s ills. The stink of the PPP’s corruption had reached the corners of the world, so that few global enterprises risked significant investments and relations with the PPP government because their home countries tracked down and charged company officials engaged in corruption in other countries.

Bisram could refer to my earlier letters to the press, which assisted in shedding light on the atrocities of the PPP administration in the few years prior to May 15, 2015.

His referral to economic activity in the PNC years — which are intended to politicize the issue and lead to the fueling of ethnic tensions — are completely irrelevant to the case for a new Governor at the Bank of Guyana.

Bisram further urges me to address perceived racial and political discriminatory policies against non-PNC supporters. If he is really serious, then he should strongly consider my advice to him, which is to desist from publishing opinion pieces aimed at perpetuating ignorance and ethnic insecurity in Guyana with fabrications and misinterpretation of facts.

Finally, I commented recently on social media that Burnham was a great man who was possessed with a vision for Guyana. Guyanese have, in the main, disconnected with his ideas and vision, and shunned the venalities of our national politics; preferring the easy, decent road to life in other countries. We most probably neglect to reflect on an important aspect of Burnham’s life — he was a social fighter for progress. He, alongside Jagan, struggled with colonial forces and other international interests through Independence. He subsequently battled with our political and economic crises up to his death.

Burnham learnt his history, our history; overcame his own personal challenges, and sought to deliver a better life for us. In this many of us are so far removed from him.

It is time we pick up Burnham’s and Cheddi’s mantles and take up the fight for economic and social progress; for change, for the vision of the better life that they envisioned for us; that is ours to take. It is time to remove from our path the obstacles which would keep us ensnared in our past.

Regards,
CRAIG SYLVESTER