The more we think things change, the more of the same we actually get. The APNU/AFC used to be the Opposition in Guyana, but things changed in May 2015 when they became the Government. Still the most important thing about APNU/AFC has remained the same – in Opposition and now in Government, as separate political parties and as a coalition, they completely rely on unabated absurdities, perversions of the truth and facts and outrageous assaults on custom, normalcy and civility. Because they lie so outrageously and clumsily, they are consistently exposed. But they are also barefaced and arrogant and, instead of apologising, APNU/AFC insult people with their mind-numbing bravado, like Moses Nagamootoo insisting with a straight face that APNU/AFC never promised rice farmers 00 per bag of paddy.
Hopefully, as a Nation we have not become so numb to the lies, misrepresentation, misdirection, bloviation and absurdities of APNU/AFC that we take them for granted. While it might be too much to expect them to apologise for their lies, we must never succumb to their arrogance. Even people who habitually pervert truth and facts, occasionally find it necessary to disown a lie they might have spun with intense passion and mighty vigour. APNU/AFC owns one of those lies that decent people demand they apologise for. In 2010 and 2011, led by the AFC, both APNU and AFC as separate political parties and then as a coalition during the 2015 election campaign lied that they had evidence the PPP inflated the roll of pensioners with more than 17,000 fake names.
Claiming that the PPP had inflated the list of pensioners and that some $116 million monthly or about $1.3 billion annually were fraudulently being misappropriated, the AFC through the late Sheila Holder, Ramjattan, Trotman and Patterson, during the 2011 budget debate, announced they had done an investigation that proved there were at least 17,000 fake names on the pensioners list. During that debate and for years after they were joined by APNU, particularly people like Volda Lawrence, Amna Ally and others.
In fact, under the name of Sheila Holder, in the Stabroek News of February 24, 2011, the AFC published a detailed account of their allegation that the 44,000 pensioners included 17,000 bogus, non-existent pensioners. Together MPs from both AFC and APNU self-righteously parroted the fake story with fervour and passion. Challenged by the PPP, the AFC barefacedly refused to submit the study they claimed showed the 17,000 fake names, but APNU joined them nevertheless. Clearly, there was no scientific study. It was a perversion of the facts and the truth, a lie intended to support their false narrative of corruption at all levels of the PPP Government.
Now that they are in control of the Government, one would expect that they would remove the 17,000 fake names and that the 2016 and 2017 lists of pensioners would be dramatically reduced. But we find out that far from being reduced, the number of persons on old-age pension has risen from about 44,000 in 2011 to 50,100 today. They exposed themselves – their 2011 and subsequent claims were not based on facts, were made-up falsities, were blatant lies.
I have no doubt that the number of old-age pensioners is 50,100. But people like Ramjattan, Trotman, Patterson, Volda Lawrence and Amna Ally, were loud in their claims that the list could not be 44,000 in 2011. Even when the then Minister, Priya Manichand, made the list available for scrutiny by MPs, Ramjattan, Trotman, Patterson, Volda Lawrence, Amna Ally and others in APNU/AFC, were adamant that the list was massively inflated. How then could these people with a straight face explain that the list is now more than 50,000? Clearly they had lied and they made up a fake story to sell the false narrative of a corrupt PPP Government.
This is one of the many lies APNU/AFC fooled people with. With increasing life expectancy (from about 60 in 1992 to 70 in 2011, the list of pensioners had significantly grown. The rate of increase of the over 65 evidenced from 1992 to 2011 applied to the period 2011 and 2017 make the list of 50,100 realistic. If there is any decency still hidden somewhere in the makeup of APNU/AFC, the lie they peddled of 17,000 bogus pensioners is one they must apologise for, not to the PPP, but to the pensioners they deemed as ghost pensioners.
