Dear Editor,
A clip came where the Hon. Sherod Duncan, MP, asked a question of the Hon. Mark ‘Antony’ Phillips, PM, MP, and many more illustrious fusions of alphabetical letters. The question had to do with the approx $100 million in ad arrears due to Stabroek News. MP Duncan asked and asked, and I watched enthralled as PM Mark ‘Antony’ Phillips flipped through, shuffled through, and hotfooted it through his impressive pile of papers. From armchair general to paper pushing general. In observing the prime minister’s labourious and torturous efforts to sift through his small heap of documents, I was glad that he wasn’t in charge of the army anymore, and now holds the sinecure of Prime Minister of Guyana. Don’t ask why, but I feel safer. And, if any Guyanese is interested why I spell Anthony as ‘Antony’, it is my way of paying tribute to Guyana’s PM, by placing him in the pantheon of Roman military and political immortals. Take a bow, PM Phillips.
It was exactly what he did with MP Duncan’s ad question. He bowed, he scraped, he mopped the top of his desk. Line-item number 6321 became for PM Phillips the equivalent of an untraceable Delphic oracle, the mysteries of the Rosetta stone. For an interminably tormenting interval, the Hon. PM groped and grabbed in an effort to grasp at that elusive sheet of paper that was embossed with line-item 6321. ‘Laak ah sed,’ it is good that PM Phillips is comfortably ensconced within the walls of parliament, and not responsible for manning the borders anymore. It would have been time to make a rapid exit towards calmer shores. After untangling his parchments, and the discovery of the scroll with line-item 6321, PM Philips took the plunge and emerged with his own stirring version of Rome’s Mark Antony in dazzling incendiary fulmination in the aftermath of dictator Julius Caesar’s falling to his ignominious end.
With apologies to PM Phillips, I compress his response to MP Duncan’s question about the $100 million SN ad payment. ‘Dis guvement is ah responsible government; whatevah de responsibilitee, it is honoured.’ I salute the man. Was all that pacing back and forth, while sitting down, really necessary? All that was required was: the PPP Gov’t owes, the PPP Gov’t pays. I guarantee it. Why was that so inordinately strenuous for PM Phillips to get moving in his fertile mind, and past his now well-trained lips? I dislike being out in these positions, where I have to stand with hat in hand before one of Guyana’s cherished sons, and differ from him; however slightly, however sharply. What other choice is there?
Rather than say: Yes, Prime Minister; and it is so Prime Ministah, I say differently. A government that is responsible, that takes responsibility seriously, does not incur a debt of $100 million and drag it out like some cheapskate, or street con. If I offend the PM’s tender sensibilities, that’s unavoidable, with no insubordination intended. The $100 million obligation to SN is not one invoice from one day ago looked at one time by one clerk. There’s a stockpile of such invoices, such claims, calls for honouring what was incurred in fair, honest commerce. In harking back to his dusty barracks day, I’m sure that then-General Phillips had acquaintance with those three ordinary words. To aid memory, they are honouring, fair, and honest. Whether he did or didn’t is beyond the scope of this message.
What is revealing is how General Phillips is now this new Guyanese man, in his ensemble of Prime Minister. Neither Denzel nor the Scarlet Pimpernel is he. But a PM who goes into these propagandistic panegyrics to responsibility, and gyrations that dance around a simple ad payment question. If the PPP, indeed, was the epitome of responsibility and honesty in government, that hundred-million-dollar question would have no place in parliament, nor raised anywhere. MP Duncan would have had little to do. Perhaps, occupy his time and earn his duty-free concession, by raising hard questions about the state of Guyana’s capital, and the stench of Georgetown, in the face of droves of excited foreigners attending a Guyana oil jamboree. That is, if the incomparably honourable Speaker Nadir would have been gracious enough to give him leeway with what may be interpreted as patented treachery. Guyana is in good hands.