Just over a year after the destruction by fire of the Brickdam Police Station which used to be housed in one of our Capital’s iconic buildings, much doubt still persists about what we were told were the circumstances under which the fire occurred. The story having been told about a prisoner, presumably in a circumstance of restraint, having somehow been able to set the building alight, was quickly set aside, by a sizeable portion of the public who found the tale of the pyromaniac prisoner to be something of an excursion into comic relief.
Nor does it appear to trouble the administration one bit that the account of the origins of the fire given to the public served no further purpose beyond opening up the Guyana Police Force to yet another helping of public ridicule.
None of this, of course, is unfamiliar to those of us who live here. We have grown used to what, all too often, are tall tales designed, frequently, to conceal instances of dereliction of duty and an attendant absence of accountability. The real stories behind some of the most bizarre occurrences in our country are, frequently, too absurd, too ludicrous to be told to the citizenry with what we in Guyana refer to as ‘a straight face.’
Why did it seem as though the warranted level of urgency and seriousness that ought to have applied in the instance of the destruction of a key and critical public security institution simply never materialized and that the preoccupation of the authorities appeared to be with putting the matter to rest in the shortest possible time? Part of the answer, one feels, reposes in the fact that the powers that be simply assume that the public have short memories, that one occurrence can quickly become subsumed beneath another.
It is, all too frequently, in matters of the greatest public importance that government often opts to employ what sometimes are the most disingenuous doses of ‘spin’ or else, opt to remain close-mouthed. It was a mix of these two approaches that was applied in the instance of the fire that destroyed the Brickdam Police Station. Once silence or ‘spin’ becomes the available options, one or another is chosen depending on the perceived likely outcomes of those options.
There have been instances, for too many of them, when government has been contemptuous of its responsibility to be ‘up front’ and straightforward about disturbing/distressing occurrences, many of which are of particular national importance. The reason? Our governance process tends to lean towards forms of behaviour in its interaction with the public that employs a strong prejudice towards equal doses of ‘spin’ and concealment. ‘Coming clean, all too frequently, is, all too frequently, not an option.
Here, it is a case of not trusting public responses. Government continues to reject the axiom that matters of national importance are, simultaneously, matters of public importance.
Fires that often wreak costly havoc to public property, public buildings, particularly, have become par for the course in Guyana. Once you do the research into the alleged causes of the respective fires and the subsequent official investigative pursuits you are bound to discern a certain level of official disinterest, a sort of let-sleeping-dogs-lie posture that inters the cause with the tragedy.
Schools, quite a few of them, have been victims of fires in recent years. The two recent incidents of fires that have destroyed schools in Georgetown (St. George’s Secondary and Christ Church Secondary) have afforded us the opportunity to witness the further disfigurement of an already less than robust physical infrastructure through the displacement of the ‘victims’ and the attendant physical disruption in the wider school system. Here again, government is possessed of a far from stellar record in matters pertaining to investigating fires at schools. When accounts of such fires finally arrive in the public domain those accounts, all too frequently, tend to talk a lot but say very little.
Public buildings and schools aside the general posture of law enforcement towards fires has come to resemble a take-it-in-our-stride approach, where official attitudes appear to care little for what one might call knock-on effects. In those instances that impact the education sector, for example, we cannot continue to embrace a ‘policy’ of protracted periods of rebuilding attended by the ‘temporary’ discommoding of both the victims of the fires and their hosts.
It is much the same thing with a wider enforcement regime that continues to ‘crow’ about our oil and gas-driven development trajectory while continuing to be indifferent to a decades-old electrical wiring infrastructure, particularly in downtown Georgetown.
All of this comes across as a kind of bizarre incongruity, a circumstance in which we fashion dreams about investments in new more ostentatious physical infrastructure whilst continually demonstrating an absurd indifference to the particular vulnerability of what we have at this time.
