After the October 2 fire that flattened the complex that used to be the Brickdam Police Station, the far-fetched tale about the origin of the fire and the official ‘ticking off’ and ‘hanging out to dry’ of the Guyana Fire Service for what was deemed to be its underperformance on the day at what, contextually, was the country’s most significant fire in recent times, never really ‘washed’ with the public.
The fire, for all its tragic proportions, appeared not to linger in the public consciousness for too long. These days, noteworthy occurrences in Guyana happen with such rapidity that public attention is compelled to move with the pace of those occurrences. All too frequently, however, the authorities tend to ignore the fact that Guyanese are an astonishingly ‘long-memoried’ people.
It was never likely that the destruction in the twinkling of an eye of one of the capital’s iconic buildings would pass without robust public comment. The authorities really ought to have known this. Beyond the fire, itself, there was the decidedly tall and unconvincing tale about its origins that appeared not to have been subjected to nearly sufficient careful public scrutiny before it was placed in the public domain. Accordingly, it found itself pushed back at the authorities with as though it were last week’s foul-smelling leftovers.
By proffering the account of the tragedy that it did, the authorities, it seemed, appeared not to comprehend the magnitude of the loss and the likelihood that it would have taken more than what Guyanese refer to as ‘a lick and a promise’ to satisfy the enormous level of public enquiry that would have arisen from the fire.
There was, as well, a certain awkwardness in the President’s ‘ticking off’ of the Guyana Fire Service for its response to the fire, which comment would have been based on reports that would have reached him. Here, one feels that there was a conspicuous absence of an immediate official demand that the Police, on the basis of its responsibility for keeping prisoners’ in the lockups ‘out of harm’s way,’ account for what appeared to be a remarkable lapse in security at the Station.
After the immediate salvo of responses a kind of hush fell over the sudden destruction by fire of one of the capital’s iconic buildings. The whole episode drifted into a kind of awkward ‘damage control’ zone, one of more amusing dimensions of which was the placement of a handful of fully kitted-out firemen outside the premises of the Ministry of Home Affairs on Brickdam, an array of inventory associated with fire-fighting lying at their feet. Whether this was an attempt to demonstrate that the Fire Service is indeed equipped to do its job effectively or some kind of penance for what was felt to be its underperformance at the scene of the fire, was difficult to tell. That said, it was a decidedly weak attempt at image-management.
It is the gap between the magnitude of the loss and the seeming lack of vigour in the ensuing probe that remains a matter of concern. Accordingly, sections of public opinion cannot be blamed for subscribing to the ‘something to hide’ theory particularly in circumstances where the extant official version of the cause of the fire revolves around the story that an impressively resourceful prisoner who ought to have been secured beyond the point where he was able to effect such unbelievable havoc, managed to ‘set’ a fire that destroyed the country’s biggest, most strategically important Police Station. The problem here, of course, is that while the public’s mind appears to have gone completely in the ‘pull the other leg’ direction, we are still left with the customary brass-faced outlook of officialdom that appears not to give ‘two hoots’ about what the public thinks.
The enduring image-management deficiencies that have been the Achilles Heel of government, over the years, again pointedly reared its head after the conflagration at the Brickdam Police Station when the authorities appeared far more eager to parade the ‘culpability’ of a prisoner fingered as the man behind the conflagration than to frontally address what, given what we know, surely must have been a serious lapse in the custodial regimen at the Station in the period leading to the start of the fire. Here, it seems that the official approach to ‘managing’ the tragedy appears very much to be driven by the assumption that it was altogether unnecessary to deliver an official account that must go beyond the prevailing dubious story. What obtains up to this time is still underpinned by an unchanging official assumption on the part of the authorities that it is dealing with an extraordinarily gullible public. The weakness in this assumption is that in such situations it is the authorities, more often than not, that end up looking the fool.
