Your Eyewitness couldn’t help but notice that the old PNC enforcer, Hamilton “Bilal” Green, is constantly in the newspapers’ letter pages, doling out fatuous opinions on everything under the sun – and then some. He focuses, of course, on getting his digs in at his ole bete noir, the PPP!! Your Eyewitness wonders whether he got that fat pension from Granger for him to be writing these missives (missiles?) Imagine, at a time when the coalition Government had arrested practically the entire outgoing PPP Cabinet for purchasing house lots in an exclusive development, they railroaded that bill in Parliament to make an exception of Bilal – define anew how to calculate a past PM’s pension! And Bilal ended up 100 times richer!! So, if the first was “unjust enrichment”, why not the second?
But it wasn’t just “a” pension, was it? It’s Hamilton Green’s pension – so much that the Bill actually named him! The pension up to then was calculated at 7/8ths of their last salary. Simple, no? Well, the APNU/AFC government decided it was TOO simple. When Bilal and the PNC were voted out in 1992, the PM’s salary was peanuts at today’s standards. But he didn’t storm the Elections HQ while President Carter was in the building for the salary!
Back then, salaries weren’t the thing – power was!! With that, he was catapulted into the public’s notice back in the sixties. Whatever money could buy and he wanted, he just commandeered it! Even Burnham bypassed him for the PM’s office in favour of Desmond Hoyte back in 1990, because he’d grown too big for his britches – and even took on the Kabaka!
So, we fast forward to the present, with Green’s pension now swollen to 7/8 of that of TODAY’s Prime Minister, Honourable Mark Phillips. But what do Phillips’s salary and perks have to do with Green, you ask, dear reader? Well, calculating from this base multiplies Green’s take home by the aforementioned 100 times!! While violating the rule on pensions just to reward one man! Why??
Well, now we know – the answer’s simple when you think of it, innit?? Green’s now a “PNC Elder”, chock full of institutional memory of the PNC’s dictatorial rule under Burnham and onwards. He’s most qualified to defend the party, thank you!! Hence the sanctimonious letters are ironically written from a supposedly “moral upliftment” perspective!! And as we see, there’s now evidently the additional benefit of him being qualified to pronounce on allegations of moral turpitude in the party!! They do say the best crooks make the best policemen!!
But, not so incidentally, between periods of resting from his labours of sending out all those letters, hasn’t he decided on l’affaire Kissoon??
…resentments
You live and learn. Your Eyewitness has just heard about a concept in Psychology called “transferred frustration”. The frustration from one situation is quickly transferred onto the first thing that it can find – even when the latter is completely innocuous!! Remember snapping at your better half?? The ill-effects of such frustration transfers are intense. Frustration (or anger) is the dead fish in your tank. It’s like the leech that’s gonna suck every idea or thought that you get and render it useless. In extreme cases, you might resort to violence!!
Right now, your Eyewitness thinks the Opposition parties – especially a minor that has an inflated opinion of itself – are quite frustrated at themselves with their inability to deal with the PPP, who’re giving their erstwhile supporters a Le Bron-like full court press. And getting results!! So, they’ve transferred their frustrations to the PPP by calling the latter “slave catchers”!! And those who cross over, “house slaves”!!
Do they realise that both Cuffy and Toussaint L’Overture were house slaves??
…the hired gun
Shridath Ramphal was reviled by the PPP for supporting Burnham in and out of Guyana – especially at the Commonwealth Secretariat. Ramphal insisted he was just a Guyanese patriot. He was evidently forgiven after the Suriname border case.
