Dear Editor,
`The police and the Matthews Ridge bust’ editorial (SN, September 14, 2024) stands as a gem in tapdancing. A reservoir of context and subplots, it is. But when the call for action, for accountability, came, the editorial was as limp as a knee with a crimp. Big busts involving a touch of this country are nothing new, whether they occurred here or in the great blue yonder out there. Big bellowing sounds usually follow from big people with big titles. What happened to them now? Did they also take a powder into the safe recesses of the thick jungle? When SN started hemming and hawing about radio silence and such, its batteries ran cold, the reception on this side of town was poor.
President Ali is usually exemplary in stridency about duty and accountability. Where is he? He cannot send himself on leave now. No, no, no sir. Say something, sir. Shuffling around senior police officers is not a solution, especially when more suspicion is raised about the sequence of events, the roles of those shifted around, and the prospects of those hurried over as replacements. This does not pertain to Matthews Ridge only and in the aftermath of the drug bust. To call that a drug bust is a discredit to the efforts of the Americans, the Guyanese summoned to forced duty (yes, I said that). It is a drug breakthrough that laid the GPF on its back, that sent the president scurrying for any cover he could find. The deliberate exclusion of the GPF says so much. When something like that happens, what does that say? Where does that leave ordinary Guyanese, when the savvy Yankees say that they are so unreliable, so tainted, that they cannot be trusted. The “they” in this instance is none other than the sorry Guyana Police Force. And the more than the normally loquacious Excellency Ali seeks shelter in his self-made sanctuary of silence, the more thunderous his escaping footfalls.
This is more than who did or didn’t what before, during, or after the big drug breakthrough. It is about what do we have for a law enforcement bulwark in a wide-open frontier country like Guyana. Guyanese already pay a harsh price for too many criminally minded and criminally tainted politicians. To live, therefore, with a police apparatus that is a reflection and extension of criminally oriented power brokers would be nothing but the death knell of this country. Oil or no oil. Democracy or no democracy, autocracy or not. Which society can survive with a three-layered criminal ring, a concentrically layered one? The power apparatus at the top, the law enforcement one in the middle, and the regular underworld level next in line in the scheme?
It is obvious that Guyanese are dealing with a chronically sick government and its many sickly human components. But they should not have to live with a sick security setup. When that is so, then what do they have? When the head of state can’t stand and speak clearly and with all straightness on the state of the police, then where is this country heading? Spinning around the top management chart is an exercise in denial. The politicization and weaponization of the GPF has come full circle. When the president can’t speak that should convey how tangled things are in the GPF. Interior failures, street failures, personnel failures, management failures, internal failures. I hope that things don’t deteriorate further. There is only so much that any society can tolerate. Ruling politicians are resourceful and resilient. They often survive unscathed. Not so the little people. Not so the law-abiding. When the PPP decided that it was a law unto itself, it marked the start of another era in the Guyana Police Force’s downward slide. Now, sorting things out is the equivalent of catching a falling knife. Edgewise.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
