Will Basil finally come to terms with his limitations?

Dear Editor,
As we are finally approaching the General and Regional Elections one year after the passing of the successful No-Confidence Motion on December 21, 2018, I cannot resist the urge to write about the gargantuan legal cost and embarrassment which this infamous and asinine legal journey initiated by the Attorney General and his Government embarked on has cost the already overburdened taxpayers of our country. Can we be able to decipher the true motive behind this seemingly futile journey?
Can anyone tell us, the citizens of Guyana, the true financial costs of the many failures of our inept Attorney General, Mr Basil Williams, SC? The answer is yet another compelling reason why Guyanese should never again vote for the APNU/AFC coalition. Let us for a moment forget the tremendous embarrassment we have had to bear, both locally and internationally, which is immeasurable in terms of money. I have seen many and heard countless derogatory remarks made on social media and it gives such a bad image about a man who holds the highest legal office of the land. The total cost which Attorney General Basil Williams accumulated since 2015 has wreaked havoc on the hard-earned taxpayers’ monies!
Let us take a look at the incompetence of this man. In 2018 he was ‘pulled’ from representing Guyana in the border case between Guyana and Venezuela, citing a need for ‘greater expertise’ since over the years he has a poor track record for winning any major cases on behalf of his Government. He has lost cases to the level of the Caribbean Court of Justice and it involved large companies and private citizens. It is not that these cases present any complex legal manoeuvring, for instance, one can recall $446 million judgment in favour of Dipcon Engineering. In this case, he had failed to appeal the Supreme Court’s judgment within the prescribed period and the CCJ declared this as ‘unacceptable’. Another glaring case was GUYTRACT where he failed to realise that the contract should have been terminated due to the failure of the contractor to lodge a performance bond. Such incompetence and ineptitude, yet he laboriously argued that the case he is likely to win has not appeared in the courts yet. Well, that was since 2018 but the opportunity came in 2019.
In 2019 the Attorney General embarked on a costly and useless legal excursion which delayed the General and Regional Elections by more than a year and tarnished our international image, irreparably. In the process his Government exposed the fact that they have disregarded and violated our Constitution to an incomparably high degree, ignoring even the CCJ rulings in the process. His and the coalition’s argument that 34 and not 33 constitutes the majority in our 65 member National Assembly will go down in the annals as the most nonsensical legal challenge ever. This is accentuated by the CCJ ruling that the appointment of Justice Patterson as the Chairman of GECOM was illegal.
Unfortunately, having lost the NCM up to the CCJ level he was still unsatisfied and tried to prove the Chief Justice’s ruling on the ‘residency requirement’ was incorrect. The Court of Appeal unanimously affirmed that residency is not a requirement for voting. But lo and behold the AG said that even though he was not disappointed he will be appealing to the highest court, the Caribbean Court of Justice.
Does this man feel that the entire Treasury is at his disposal to waste hard-earned taxpayer dollars in such a frivolous manner and upon his whims and fancies? Let us now try to put a cost to his legal incompetence. The No-Confidence to the CCJ legal cost is approximately US$2 million or $440 million; the RUDISA case, another US$6 million (this case would have been withdrawn since GRA had to do an audit of the company for breaches) or $1.3 billion; another $1.2 billion to BK International; the NCM case locally cost about $200 million; the residency case another $50 million, the GUYTRACT case cost us $226 million and the illegal revocation of the rice farmers’ lease which cost more than $20 million and the list goes on ad infinitum! This is willful squandering! I do feel that if the coalition should be given another term then Basil Williams’ incompetence will have to be given a permanent budgetary allocation in Budget 2020 and beyond!
Our legal system has been constantly used as an expensive mockery by our Attorney General and I am sure that Guyanese have not seen the end of this man’s ‘legal antics’. To quote our legal luminary and former Attorney General, Anil Nandlall, ‘the string of failures has been unending…’ but he will persist. We can expect more after March 2, 2020, should the coalition be destroyed at the polls, and from all indications such an outcome is inevitable. Will Basil finally come to terms with his limitations? ‘A man must know his limitations’, Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry!

Yours sincerely,
Haseef Yusuf