Kindly allow me to invite readers to take a closer look at a couple issues running riot in the media at present. What is your take from reports on two senior officials, one saying that it was "a" when it was shown to be not, and the other claiming a judge's assignment on a matter when it was shown also not to be so?
In both instances, the Judiciary is involved denying the claims made by these officials, effectively eliminating the standard procedure in cases like these of "accusation followed by denial" with the matter laid to rest thereafter.Is it likely that the Judiciary, being the pillar of society that it is, would itself tell a lie and if not, what do these false claims amount to? Were these claims made inadvertently or in error as claimed by one, or are they deliberate and willful attempts to mislead by distorting the truth?
I leave the answers to your better judgement, but in carrying the evidence to its logical conclusion, what for me is more significant is not so much that a wrongful act has been committed by senior officials, for we are virtually drowning in wrongdoing, mistakes, missteps, call it what you will, at this level at every turn, the allegation of a senior officer being induced to withdraw testimony in another key matter being another case in point!
What astounds me is that such a debased act of deliberately distorting the truth or telling a lie to be less euphemistic, which is the province of the ordinary criminal who may not know better, can come from the mouths of the upper echelons of the society from whom we look for role models to pattern our own lives.
In the politics, and especially our brand of politics, I would expect manipulation and manoeuvering, camouflaging and dissembling for it is in the nature of the political game, but plain unadulterated misrepresentation of the facts by top brass in the society is difficult to swallow.
But still, the bigger question is that how people of such stature can become so indifferent to the issues of self-respect and the dignity of the person? Perhaps it is because of a culture of wrongdoing without consequence which has seeped deep into our psyche as a people and of which our leaders are the chief exponents, the latter so, because the rightness of their behaviours is never an issue to us and we never hold them to account, so busy are we serving ourselves from what they have to offer.
Which is why the legitimate call for the resignation of these two officials will fall on deaf ears for such action will presume a sense of remorse over wrongdoing and the need to make reparation through self-sacrifice as Nixon did over Watergate or Profumo in the Profumo scandal or even our own Subhas in our own insider trading scandal.
But we can't give our leaders in this country that moral sense which is the natural yardstick of a society where truth and justice are sacrosanct for the simple reason that our politics of division has totally eliminated that component of their behaviour so that they dissemble without conscience. Which is why tomorrow all will be forgotten and it will be business as usual!
Dr Errol Benjamin