It took ‘no time at all’ for the earliest wave of official information into the immediate-term probe of the Saturday October 2 fire that destroyed almost everything that was once the Brickdam Police Station, to be trotted out and thereafter to be quickly advanced to a point where the authorities could state, seemingly with monumental confidence, that it was a prisoner in the custody of the police who was responsible for the incineration of almost the entire complex.
Nor did it appear to trouble the authorities that Guyanese as a whole, given what has become the ingrained view that government is not averse to disseminating ‘tall tales’ in these kinds of situations, have considerably sharpened their own deductive skills.
Frankly, it is a matter of much regret that official accounts of some matters of national importance usually trigger a public dash in directions entirely different from those in which the officially disseminated information point, in search of what Guyanese loosely describe as the ‘bottom line.’ It is, truth be told, a profound expression of a lack of confidence in the official public information dissemination setup.
Some important points arise out of the matter of the fire. Here are two of them. The first has to do with the unbelievably convoluted account of how a prisoner who was identified as the arsonist actually set the fire; the second had to do with the nexus between the particular area in which the fire allegedly started and where the Station’s ‘Fraud Department’ is housed. Neither of these issues appear, at least up until now, to have been ventilated with anything resembling the requisite thoroughness. Accordingly, the already thick crust of public cynicism that has hardened around how and perhaps why the fire started appears to grow firmer.
As has already been mentioned, from the inception the authorities always appeared to be aware that the official version of the cause of the fire was likely to come under ‘forensic’ public scrutiny and possibly given short shrift. The reality here, is, (and it is a sad reality) that officialdom in Guyana has come to be seen as having a proclivity for stories from which, frequently, can be extracted no more than the barest scraps of believability and which are designed to bamboozle rather than enlighten. That is the way in which the state information machinery frequently works in our country. The problem for the authorities is that, over many years, a sizeable section of public opinion has ‘wisened up’ to that ruse so that much of what emanates from official public statements these days usually become sources of public derision and ridicule.
It is the same with the Brickdam Police Station Fire. Witness the fact that it was as much the substantive credibility of the Police Force rather than the actual truth of how the Brickdam Police Station came to be almost completely destroyed that became the primary public talking point in the wake of the fire. That is saying something about the extent of public confidence in official disclosures on matters pertaining to the police.
Whatever the limitations/shortcomings of the Guyana Fire Service it certainly seemed that the official ‘calling out’ of what was felt by the authorities to be its unsatisfactory response to the fire – to which both the President and the Minister of Home Affairs added their voices – was entirely overdone particularly since no corresponding reprimand was hung around the neck of the Guyana Police Force for having a station security regime that created opportunity for a prisoner in custody to set fire to “a section of the police station which housed the Fraud Department,” specifically, “an old wooden structure which was located close to the lock-ups area.” (Stabroek News story: Friday October 8th, 2021)
Interestingly, while the now Acting Fire Chief and his Fire Prevention Officer were subjected to a slew of what, sometimes, were harsh questions at a Thursday October 8 media briefing on the post-fire investigation, the matter of the possible aforementioned negligence of the Police never appeared to arise there. Why, for example, (at least as far as we are aware) hasn’t the Acting Commissioner of Police, up to this time, been required to account publicly for such security ‘glitches’ as might have caused a man in police custody to secure access to both the materiel and the opportunity to set a fire that would ultimately incinerate 80% of the Brickdam Police Station including highly sensitive documents?
Moving on, it does not seem, at least at this juncture, as though the matter of the near complete destruction of the Brickdam Police Station has a great deal further to go, particularly in the court of public opinion. Its ‘verdict,’ quite simply, lacks the ‘weight’ of an official imprimatur to provide a proper path down which the investigation can be guided. This much is reflected in the events that have followed one of the more significant fires to have occurred in the country’s recent history.
Official efforts to move us back quickly to a pre-fire, ‘as-you-were’ position is reflected in the decision, first, to dispatch the Fire Chief on leave.
Setting all that aside what are we to make of the subsequent parading of a contingent of kitted out Fire Fighters and their equipment outside the Ministry of Home Affairs? In truth, it is really no more than a decidedly unimaginative official attempt to reinforce the official boisterous reprimand to which the Fire Service had earlier been subjected. The image of the Fire Service performing a symbolic post-fire act of public penance, which is what the be-suited firemen outside the Ministry of Home Affairs were doing, is in fact the visible symbol of the kind of bizarre humiliation to which out-of-favour individuals and institutions are sometimes subjected and which is in keeping with the protocols of our unchanging Kafkaesque political culture.
