Ministers of government have an obligation to manage the image of their portfolios efficiently, to seek to ensure, that, as far as possible, their ministries and departments pass the public test in so far as service-delivery is concerned. Successful image management in state institutions is best assured by ensuring that, as far as possible, those institutions actually serve their public purpose with at least a minimum level of effectiveness. Where those institutions continually fail to discharge their responsibilities with some reasonable level of competence and where they fall short of public expectations, they will come in for criticism.
That is as it should be, though as far as some ministers and other high officials are concerned image management is about the ability to manipulate the truth and sometimes to conceal information altogether so that a great deal of effort frequently goes into hiding incompetence and inefficiency and covering up other shortcomings.
While some ministers regard it as their duty to protect their ministries from prying eyes and ears and therefore rarely engage the media, others, unable to resist the lure of the public limelight, may condescend to provide information but afterwards, proceed to ascribe some ulterior motive to any media report that essays even the smallest criticism of the ministries they control. One particularly unpalatable propensity of some ministers within the incumbent political administration is the practice of claiming the existence of a political conspiracy behind criticism of their ministries and departments that appear in the media.
It has long been commonplace for some high officials to tag sections of the independent media as co-conspirators in what they claim to be plots designed to discredit their ministries and departments, though they are usually not forthcoming with credible evidence to support what, frankly, are no more than far-fetched claims, the real objectives of which are really to conceal shortcomings which, all too frequently, derive from incompetence that results in underperformance.
As image management ruses go this is a devious and unimaginative practice that resembles the sort of paranoia that afflicts undemocratic regimes, mindful of whatever eventuality they perceive to be inimical to their hold on power.
Some state entities, on account of the nature of their services that they must provide, have higher public profiles than others. The Guyana Police Force (GPF) for example, as a general rule, comes under more focused, more sustained public scrutiny than most other state institutions. The same is true of the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation. Law enforcement and health care entities the world over are under a greater degree of pressure than most other state institutions to meet public expectations, if only because the services that they provide have a more critical bearing on the well-being of the state than some others.
Here in Guyana, the quality of law enforcement provided by the Guyana Police Force continues (in a multitude of respects) to fail to meet public expectations. Crime is and has been for several years, one of the biggest single national concerns, and if it would be needlessly repetitive to restate what are perhaps some of the key reasons for the failings of local law-enforcement; it is worth restating that the government itself is largely to blame for many of the deficiencies in our policing capacity.
The problem goes beyond the mere routine commission of one crime or another. Entire regions of the country have been left virtually to fend for themselves as far as law enforcement is concerned. There are communities in the interior of Guyana which have become completely enveloped in crime and violence in the face of a complete absence of law-enforcing restraint.
At the end of the year that we left behind just a few days ago independent media houses were treated to one of Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee’s familiar tirades about media-driven conspiracies designed to undermine the image of his ministry in general and the police in particular. This newspaper has grown accustomed to Mr Rohee’s tirades which, frequently, bear a striking resemblance to pure theatre. Still, we believe that the importance of his office provides good enough reason for what he says to be taken seriously. Mr Rohee, of course, has long contrived his own particular way of attracting media and public attention. Often, he does so by making utterances that appear to rely for their claim to public importance on the extent of their sensationalism rather than on their accuracy. That is the context in which we place Mr Rohee’s Old Year’s Day remarks.
Still, however far-fetched Mr Rohee’s Old Year’s Day comments may seem, there is a real danger in his thesis which, in the main, appears to anchor sections of the media to political conspiracies to undermine or perhaps even derail the political administration in one unspecified way or another. And while we feel entirely at liberty to describe Mr Rohee’s claim as arrant nonsense we are, nonetheless, mindful of the fact that the propagation of such views might well injure media/police relations in unexpected and decidedly unwholesome ways.
And where in the world did Mr Rohee get it into his head that there are “huge profits” to be made by sections of the media “who deliberately paint the Ministry [of Home Affairs] in a bad light”? Would it not be altogether appropriate for him to order a thorough investigation into what one assumes is the serious allegation of payments for leaks from the Force, the most important department within his portfolio?
It would hardly be an overstatement to suggest there that the Home Affairs Minister’s perception of 2014 as being a “relatively successful year for law enforcement agencies” and that “peace and good order in our society prevailed” during the year is both at variance with the facts but wildly fanciful. Not only does Mr Rohee’s utterance completely ignore the continually escalating threat which the various forms of criminal activity pose to public safety, it overlooks, astonishingly, evidence of a near complete absence of institutions that represent law and order in large swathes of the Republic and, as a consequence, the prevalence of ‘wild west’ arrangements for self-protection in the face of unchecked crime.
That Mr Rohee so often appears ill at ease with the reportage of independent media houses really has less to do with his theories of political conspiracies designed to discredit his ministry and the incumbent political administration and more to do with the fact that an unfettered press with no axes to grind will continue to expose the gaping gap between the obligations of the Force and its capacity to meet those obligations with anything resembling an acceptable level of effectiveness. If this newspaper will not ever be unmindful of a public comment by the Home Affairs Minister it cannot allow his fanciful conspiratorial theories pass without appropriate comment.
