A most remarkable week

Nov 23, 2008 Features / Columnists, My Column

This week so many things happened that the newspapers had a field day. Work was easy for the reporter because he did not have to do much to get a story although some of them were too complacent or too lazy or too inexperienced to track some of the very stories that were before their eyes.

One of them involved Minister Henry Jeffrey who has decided that he would demit office because of an area of disagreement with President Bharrat Jagdeo.

At issue is the Economic Partnership Agreement that Guyana eventually signed but which President Jagdeo contended would do more harm for the region than it would bring good.

Dr Henry Jeffrey holds the opposing view and one analyst concluded that he must have been the only person in the Cabinet to have read the document. I have not read it although I hear that it is online and one day I would get down to doing this.

What is refreshing is that there are people who would make their opposing views known instead of being ‘Yes Men’ and kowtowing to everything that the leader says.

I saw a lot of this in my days working with the late Forbes Burnham and I even saw some when I worked with the late Desmond Hoyte.

If I may say so myself, whenever there was something with which I did not agree I made my objections known and I suppose I was respected and this must have been responsible for me being the person I am today.

The other thing that I noticed hinged on sex. It seems that in increasing numbers, men are becoming beasts, seeking to have sex with babies and little children. I have also noticed that the victims, when able to testify, often back down.

There was one such case in the courts this past week. A young girl’s uncle, her mother’s brother, began to sexually molest her from the age of 12. The child endured all this and I am still not sure that she told her mother when the molestation first began.

What I do know is that the matter ended up in court. The uncle was slapped with a number of charges, including one relating to having anal sex with the child.

I have many nieces, a lot of them parents themselves, and I simply cannot imagine myself having sex with one of them. The thought is revolting. But not to this beast who the judge has left to the mercies of the Supreme Being.

The man even impregnated the girl who now bears his child. She is pregnant with another and I would not put my head on a block that this second child is not his, although it may not be.

There were four charges facing the Monster of Soesdyke and each carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The girl, now 17, went through the preliminary inquiry, perhaps when she was about 14 or 15.

Before Justice Winston Patterson she announced that she did not wish to lead any evidence against her tormentor.

Then came the funny side of the entire equation. He is the sole breadwinner. What does being a breadwinner have to do with sexual molestation?

If the truth be told, many mothers have become lazy. They depend on a man and more often than not, this does not work out. But this man is an uncle, not even her mother’s husband unless he shared his sister’s bed.

Anyhow, the man was allowed to walk out of the court and the world knows that once a molester, always a molester. He is going to do it again to some other child. And from the evidence provided by a man who once professed to be a man of the cloth, this will be the case.

This other man was accused of molesting a baby who is now two years old. The medical experts say that the child is not virgo intacto (the hymen has been ruptured) but no charges have been laid despite the best efforts of the mother who herself said that this very man molested her when she was a child.

I called the Director of Public Prosecutions to find out why she chose not to institute charges and learnt that there was not enough circumstantial evidence. For one, there was no eyewitness to any assault (such a grown man would be too smart for that); there were others, particularly the people at the day care centre that the child attends.

Then I learnt that this is not even the tip of the iceberg. I propose to access records of grown men who assault children and make these public.

This past week was full of news and grim incidents. It is a good thing that each week is not like this although I am certain that even as I pen this column some grown man is molesting a little girl.

And of course there was the testing for HIV, with a whopping 11,500 tests conducted. Perhaps this may be worth talking about, particularly since there was one woman who told me that she was married and faithful but…

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