By Arif Bulkan and D. Alissa Trotz (with input from Ulele Burnham)
It is now less than a week since the release of the recorded telephone call between Mohabir Anil Nandlall, Guyana’s Attorney General (AG), and Kaieteur News reporter Leonard Gildarie. In the profanity-laced recording, one version of which has received close to 10,000 hits on the internet, the voice purported to be that of the AG is heard attempting to solicit the name of a young female reporter who his relative appears to have expressed a sexual interest in (“De man wan [expletive] de girl, man, the man tell me seriously he wan knock de girl”), personally admitting to financial impropriety (“I use some money from the government, Glen mek an issue of it I pay back deh [expletive] money long before he even mek de issue and he know about it because I pay it back”), and suggesting that those who use the newspapers as a “weapon” to attack the government might expect violent retaliation (“When you continue attack people like that and they have no way of responding they gun just walk with their weapon into that same [expletive] Saffon Street office and what come suh do and innocent Peter gun gah pay fuh [expletive] Paul in deh one day, me ah tell you innocent, me a tell you honestly man to man that will happen soon..”). Given what appear to be threats against Kaieteur News, proprietor Glen Lall has since taken the recording to the police, an understandable move in light of the cold-blooded murder of four Kaieteur News workers eight years ago. And this sordid matter is getting picked up internationally, with the Austria-based International Press Institute releasing a statement expressing deep concern at the apparent threats issued against the newspaper.
Amidst a growing chorus for the AG’s resignation that includes the Guyana Bar Association, Guyana Women Lawyers’ Association, Guyana Human Rights Association and the parliamentary opposition, what has been the official response? The Government of Guyana and the AG have not denied that the voice in the recording is Anil Nandlall’s; nor have they denied that the conversation did in fact take place. But their response has taken the form of describing Kaieteur News as engaging in conduct that is vicious, disgusting, negative, indecent, immoral, dastardly (their words), and of manipulating and distorting a private conversation. Meanwhile, Nandlall has gone to the courts, bringing a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper. Remarkably, they have said absolutely nothing about the shocking utterances caught on tape, leading an editorial in Saturday’s Trinidad Express to conclude that “Now that such apparent threats have been made public, President Donald Ramotar’s government should go beyond denouncing the secret taping. The region waits to hear him make clear his total repudiation of violent attacks, threatened or planned, against Kaieteur News.”
Much has been made by the government about the propriety of the conversation between the Attorney General and the journalist Mr. Gildarie being recorded and later placed in the public domain. Both the President and Mr. Nandlall have contended that the conversation ought to have remained private and was taken out of context. The public has at present scant information pointing to the means by which the conversation was recorded or the person(s) who performed or authorized the recording. In other jurisdictions, covert recording and subsequent reporting may be the kind of conduct that could attract the censure of the court by reference either to the common law principles of libel and defamation and a developing international jurisprudence on privacy rights. On the other hand, deception has been for many years a vital tool in the armoury of investigative journalists who seek to expose crime or serious impropriety and to prevent the public from being misled. Many of the breaches of the civil or criminal law that might be invoked against a member of the press in such circumstances can be defended on the basis that the journalist acted in order to discover something in the “public interest”. We must let the courts decide, if required, on the lawfulness of the conduct of KN and its journalists in due course. What we are concerned with, today, is a matter of far wider impact and import: the rectitude of the Attorney General, the state’s most senior law officer and putative legal guardian of that very “public interest”, remaining in office when statements made by him, which scandalize his office, are already etched in the public’s consciousness.
Since neither Mr. Nandlall nor the President has suggested that the words attributed to him on the publicly available transcript and recording are not his own, the most neutral (neutered even) interpretation of what Mr. Nandlall said suggests that he was aware of and would acquiesce into extra-judicial action against the government’s critics, that the President was prepared to trade leniency in criminal proceedings against the proprietor’s wife in exchange for less critical media coverage of the government, that he had taken “money” out of the government’s coffers which he had since returned, and that he was prepared to issue “threats” or “warnings” of the use of extra-judicial force. All this at the same time as attempting to obtain the identity of a young woman who might be a suitable object for (somebody else’s) sexual pleasure. If ever we needed guidance on that zone in which private conversations take on a dimension that justifies public scrutiny, in this shocking reported conversation Mr. Nandlall has perhaps helped us to define it more eloquently than we could ever have imagined.
It matters not for these purposes whether the “threats” were or were not serious or that they were made in a conversation that Mr. Nandlall believed to be private. The Attorney General is the most senior law officer in the land – how can he be expected to compel adherence to and generate respect for the justice system when he demonstrates for it such extravagant contempt, even in private? This is a person in whom we are meant to repose our trust to ensure that the law will be applied without fear or favour by an independent judiciary. This is the public officer who is supposed to act as the guarantor that no one will be punished except via the law’s proper operation. Where penitence ought to have been his primary if not his only response, his actions since the publication of the recording/transcript have done little to assuage widespread concerns about his fitness for this pivotal role. With his focus solely on the lawfulness of the conduct of the members of the press, he has proffered neither an apology nor an expression of regret for his own.
Instead, in a rambling facebook post Mr. Nandlall has adopted a defiant and even self-righteous stance – in the process demonstrating not merely poor judgment but new levels of cognitive dissonance. He begins by linking privacy to humanity, making the quantum leap that without it ‘man’s status is reduced to that of animals’. Any connection between privacy and humanity seems tenuous, but the real outlandishness of this ‘defence’ is revealed when one has regard to the actual substance of Mr. Nandlall’s conversation. No amount of privacy can doctor, elevate or otherwise alleviate the inhumanity of communications in which the country’s most senior law officer admits to unethical behaviour in office, reveals knowledge of possible violent, extra-judicial action against private citizens, and alludes to a third party interested in ‘knocking’ a woman. This conversation, in all its sordid detail, might be described as “animalistic”, to use Mr. Nandlall’s term, but certainly not because of its lack of privacy.
Not even Lazarus should be able to come back from such career-ending revelations of behaviour and character, but Mr. Nandlall makes an effort to do so by claiming victimhood. Insisting that his communications were ‘manipulated and distorted’, he laments the power of the press in which everyone who does not grovel before it is unsafe. This utterance, however, is completely at odds with the realities of Mr. Nandlall’s own charmed existence, in which he is a self-proclaimed rich and powerful member of a ruling elite that controls an extensive communications empire. Print, radio, television and internet media are all dominated by the ruling class and their favoured associates, with the result that Mr. Nandlall’s party exerts a crippling stranglehold on information. Mr. Nandlall is not an unsafe or vulnerable citizen with no voice, and his attempts to play the role of the victim are disingenuous at best. And yet despite his privileged access to the public eye and ear, he has been unable to elaborate upon how his conversation was manipulated or distorted, and we are left to struggle to find any context in which dipping into the till, circumventing the administration of justice, or tacitly approving of extra-judicial action, can be rendered benign or acceptable.
But perhaps the supreme insult of Mr. Nandlall’s defence of himself is his invocation of the rule of law. He writes that it is the Press which is above the law and that “anyone who tries to apply to them the norms of civilized society” becomes exposed to brutal attack. Such a response asks of the public that we forget what must surely be the lasting legacy of the post-Jagan period of the PPP administration, namely the systematic dismantling of institutions of good governance, endemic corruption, and the complete abandonment of the rule of law, one of the central tenets of which is the subjugation of all before the law. In contrast, the hallmark of this government appears to be the immunity it has extended to its highest ranking officers, whatever the allegation. The list is depressingly extensive, but it includes high ranking ones who have had their visas revoked, or a Minister who allegedly authorized the purchase of spying equipment for a convicted drug trafficker, or the Minister who crashed his car and fled the scene, or the AG who appeared in his private capacity for the Minister, and so on and on. None of these officials was ever called to account, making a mockery of that central tenet of the rule of law that all are equal before the law. Guyanese would have to fall prey to mass amnesia not to remember these serial infractions of the rule of law by the highest-ranking members of the PPP, so Mr. Nandlall’s attempts to invoke it now are hollow and unconvincing. And it is no answer that these and analogous excesses characterised the Burnham years; none of us at all suggests that the conduct we criticise can be condoned in any circumstances. We are speaking in this piece to what British writer Zadie Smith refers to as the tense present, not of an imperfect past.
Near the end of his facebook post, Attorney General Anil Nandlall uses the four immortal words: “History will absolve me.” To those unfamiliar with Caribbean, indeed world history, those are the words uttered by Fidel Castro at his trial in 1953, six years before the successful Cuban Revolution. Those unforgettable lines were issued to make the case to the Cuban people of the need for collective social transformation. That they should be deployed to shield the government from proper criticism of the social decay, of which the AG’s comments are symptomatic, is a sacrilege. It is also a tragic commentary on the degraded political culture that the post Jagan years have delivered. Quoting the words of the hero of Cuban independence Jose Marti at his trial, Fidel Castro stated, “A true man does not seek the path where advantage lies, but rather the path where duty lies.” The AG’s duty is to act with propriety equal to his office. This he has failed to do and for that there is no absolution.