Patterson cannot chair Public Accounts Committee – Parliament must depose him

David Patterson is Chair of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament. He has lost all moral right to this position. Any decent person would do the right thing and resign, but Patterson is pigheaded, he is refusing to respect the integrity of the Parliament and the integrity of the PAC. More importantly, the other APNU/AFC MPs who are members of the PAC are collaborating with Patterson to block the PAC from itself doing the right thing. The majority of MPs who are members of the PAC are agreed that David Patterson is not morally or ethically qualified to be the Chair, but the minority are able to block action in removing Patterson as the head by using a technical procedural rule; that is: that the Chair must come from the Opposition. The Opposition MPs have been doing a morally repugnant dance. Patterson, as the Chair, usually starts a meeting, then recuses himself, followed by the refusal of other MPs from the Opposition side to accept the Chair’s position.
In the circumstance, the Parliament must act. Since one of its most critical Standing Committees is being sabotaged and obstructed, the Parliament, as a whole, must unlock the logjam. It is time the Parliament act and remove David Patterson from the PAC. Any failure to remove Patterson from the PAC would mean that the PAC has lost the moral authority to adjudicate and to scrutinise the Auditor General’s Report. It would be like putting “cat to watch milk”.
In keeping with its legacy of obstructing and sabotaging democracy and good governance, APNU/AFC (PNC in disguise) is presently engaged in blocking the work of the PAC. The PAC is one of the more critical Standing Committees of Parliament; it is responsible for scrutinising the Auditor General’s Annual Report, and therefore holding Government accountable for the resources the Parliament allocates to the Government, and for ensuring the resources within the Consolidated Fund are managed in accordance with the laws of Guyana. The Chair person, in accordance with our laws, must be an MP from the Opposition. The Opposition chose David Patterson as the Chair of the PAC. A number of corrupt transactions have been alleged to have occurred when Patterson was Minister of Infrastructure. He is, in fact, charged with a crime, and is presently before the courts. It is an untenable situation: how can he, having been charged and under a cloud with the numerous allegations of corruption, be the Chair of the parliamentary mechanism that is mandated with responsibility to stop abuses of the public purse?
The PAC, at an earlier meeting, had before it a motion for Patterson to suspend himself as the Chair. Patterson, once the motion was presented, recused himself, but his colleagues refused to Chair the PAC meeting. Since the PAC must be chaired by the Opposition, the refusal essentially is designed to stymie the functioning of the PAC. It is a deliberate plan to prevent the PAC from continuing its scrutiny of the Auditor General’s Reports for 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. Those reports represent a compendium of the worst examples of corrupt transactions in the history of this country.
The Auditor General’s Report for those years provides evidence of corruption in all the Ministries, but the Ministry that stood out as the poster child for corruption was the Ministry of Infrastructure. The Minister responsible for that Ministry between 2015 and 2020 was David Patterson. One of the transactions that were featured in the Auditor General’s Report and was one of the cases for a damning report by the Procurement Commission was the feasibility study for the Demerara River Bridge. This was a single-sourced contract for $160M. That case is before the courts.
It is sheer brazenness that a man under such a cloud would insist that he has to lead the scrutiny of the Auditor General’s Report. It is a lack, a total lack of integrity that a man would hypocritically want to be the head scrutiniser of a report in which he is one of the parties for which serious questions have been raised surrounding his role. He has even received expensive gifts from agencies under his control, gifts procured with taxpayers’ money. Any decent person would have opted to resign, but not David Patterson.
Patterson’s behaviour is not shocking, although unacceptable. This is the same man who was part of a machinery that tried to thief a whole election. This is one of the men who defended those who had led the attempted rigging of the March 2020 elections. Thus, when we look at the corruption with the Demerara Harbour Bridge Corporation, the DHB asphalt plant, the CJIA expansion project, and the very many questionable transactions: like the Durban Park scandal, like the Leguan Stelling etc., we wonder how could any Government have permitted such a man to stay as a Minister for five long years. This is the man who insists he has the right to head the scrutiny of the Auditor General’s Report. Enough is enough! Patterson must go!