Death comes suddenly!

Aug 05, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

On Monday morning, I was asked to meet someone who was extremely close to Joseph O’Lall while he was alive. This person has not given me permission to publicise the nature of the relation and to identify gender. Within a month’s time, when a certain person leaves Guyana, this person will go public with what they know.
I spent an hour with the O’Lall connection (that is how I will refer to this person.) Two sets of documents were shown to me. One cluster relates to a file O’Lall kept. The other were medical papers relating to circumstances connected to his sudden death
On examining the totality of the presentations, I would say the evidence of both sets of documents is not fool-proof. There are weak points a prying journalist could find in them. But there are definitely materials that I have seen that need to be investigated by media practitioners.
When I encounter these situations, my instincts tell me to impart what I have seen with fellow media practitioners. I called Dale Andrews of this newspaper to ask to meet me at the ATM machine of Republic Bank at New Market Street. Then, I contacted Colin Smith of the Catholic Standard.
It seems that Joseph O’Lall was no fool. He had information on powerful people that could have brought them down. Secondly, some of the papers I see raise questions about his sudden death. There are too many conflicting points about how he took ill, what afflicted him and what he died from.
One of the threads of this column is that the PPP Government has dragged this nation into perversities that are more frightening than when Burnham ruled. I am not going to burden this essay with an adumbration of what is dictatorship. Suffice it to say that dictatorship is the deformation, corrugation, contortion and corruption of power by those who are in charge of the state machinery of a country and by extension has authority (whether legal or quasi-legal or extra-constitutional) over a defined territory.
It is intellectually embarrassing, bordering on asininity, to postulate a theory that says an elected government cannot become a dictatorship. I will not dignify that foolishness. Dictatorship is the abuse of power. Mr. Ravi Dev can juggle old definitions as much as he wants. When his acrobatic act is over, he has to face the modern interpretation of dictatorship.
Let us get back to perversities and scandals. We can identify four murders in the Burnham regime. The Hoyte Government saw no murders and is a vastly morally superior government to the present regime and yes, I know Hoyte came to power through a rigged election but the abuse of power at the moment is greater than under Hoyte; much greater.
Those killed were Ohene Koama, Walter Rodney, Vincent Teekah and Father Bernard Darke. Darke’s murder was captured on camera. The police killed Koama in cold-blood. Rodney was assassinated. All three killings were done in open space in Georgetown. Teekah’s homicide was a closed conspiracy.
Under the PPP, there is Paul Thomas (Kerzorkee), David Leander (Biscuit), Ronald Waddell, Donna Mc Kinnon and Axel Williams (to name just five; yes just five). Could O’Lall be added to the list? Thomas was poisoned and there is every reason to believe that he was about to break and talk about powerful people who directed an extra-judicial squad that engaged in nocturnal death-hunting.
Leander’s passing away raises millions of questions. The opinion out there is that he was poisoned too. Mc Kinnon was mysteriously shot and her lifeless body lay on an empty plot of land adjoining Freedom House.
My question on Axel Williams’s death remains the only one on record in relation to the inaction of then Home Affairs Minister, Ronald Gajraj, to pursue his plotters. Gajraj admitted to a judicial inquiry that he used the service of Williams to fight the violent men held up in Buxton.
After his death, I asked why Gajraj didn’t pursue the police investigation with raging relentlessness. After all, Williams was extremely helpful to him. At the official commission of inquiry, he categorized Williams as a brave man. There was no intense probe and no one was ever held for Williams’s execution.
The point I am getting at is that unlike Burnham’s administration, in the current age we live in there is an invisible Shakespearian dagger that moves silently in the night piercing the heart of those who are dispensable. At the same time, Macbethian witches brew a deadly poison that finds itself in the veins of those who are destined to die.
In Guyana since 1992, death comes suddenly. Did it come like that for Joseph O’Lall?

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Death comes suddenly!

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