To state that the image of the Guyana Police Force has descended to worrisome depths – which we may not have thought conceivable even a few years ago – is to indulge in considerable understatement. Currently, a senior police officer who, substantively, occupies a sensitive position within the Force’s administrative lineup has been hauled before the courts on charges linked to various integrity-related issues.
The matter has attracted public attention at a national level and one has good reasons to believe that it has, as well, not gone unnoticed internationally. The simple reason for the external attention that this matter would have attracted has to do with how Guyana, these days, is perceived in the international community. Certainly, the country’s image as a potential investment haven in the region would have caused observers to at least take a note of the matter involving the aforementioned senior police officer.
This, one might argue, is not a time to negatively interfere with the country’s image as an investment haven and that being the case any ‘whiff’ of integrity-related anomalies at the level of state functionaries may well impact, to one extent or another, on what, these days, is perceived by the global business community as, very possibly, the ‘choice’ investment haven in the region.
Integrity is usually one of the issues that drives trust in matters of business and it might well turn out to be the case that it will impact negatively on Guyana’s global image as a convivial place in/with which to do business.
What can hardly be contested is the reality that this occurrence and its outcomes could well inform some investor perceptions of Guyana, as a whole, going forward, a circumstance that might, to a greater or lesser extent, compromise the country’s standing as a place with which to do business. The more immediate problem for both the state and Guyana is how to execute an image management exercise that persuades both its domestic – and, arguably, more importantly, its external audiences – that those institutions that are charged with overseeing integrity-related concerns are ‘above board’ in terms of their own operations. Here it has to be said that investors are likely to want to be persuaded that those aspects of their operations that are linked to support from the disciplined forces (in this particular instance, the police) are not mired in chicanery and corruption and that the country’s efforts to use its oil resources to grow the economy does not push us towards being perceived as some sort of pariah.
These are altogether different days. External entities that now regard Guyana as the most strategically important investment haven in the Caribbean would by now have ‘picked up’ on the reports that have been circulating in Guyana and would have begun to protect themselves from ‘institutional shakedowns’ created by state (and other) entities that are part of the glue that holds the relationship between foreign investors and the Government of Guyana together. There can now be no question than that the state must now hold the Guyana Police Force to account in a manner which, seemingly, it has neglected to do, previously. As one commentator remarked to this newspaper, all too often it appears as though there exists a ‘disconnect’ between the state and the Guyana Police Force. If that is indeed the case, it has to end.