If the PPP does not honour the laws of Guyana, it will not honour an agreement with Guyanese

Dec 08, 2012 Letters

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Dear Editor,
The writer of the Peeping Tom article, “No moral basis for agreement to proceed,” was right to opt for a pseudonym instead of attaching his or her name to his/her absurd article.
First, the writer said that by undertaking through the passage of a no-confidence motion in the House of Assembly, the parliamentary opposition prejudged and violated the spirit of the agreement between the PPP government and representatives of Linden in the wake of the July 18 killings.
The truth is that the parliamentary opposition’s  decision to pass a no-confidence motion against Home Affairs Minister, Mr. Clement Rohee, was not based solely on the Linden tragedy, but on a series of incidents related to the performance of the Guyana Police Force, which pointed to a failure by the minister to provide badly needed oversight policies to ensure the force operated as a professional and not a political entity.
And while the opposition is painfully aware that the minister serves at the pleasure of the President and is part of a system that allows collective decision-making to replace individual responsibility for policy implementation at cabinet level, the opposition has an obligation to the public to put the pressure on Mr. Rohee in order to get the government to make the changes needed for the police force to be independent of political interference or control and function as a truly professional body.
Peeping Tom should know that in the wake of the 2002-2004 crime waves, then President Bharrat Jagdeo wrote a letter to the British government asking for help in reforming the police force. When the British responded with a GY$160M grant for security sector reform, it reportedly offered, as part of the reform exercise, to station its personnel among Guyana’s police personnel.
But when the Jagdeo regime declared Guyana’s sovereignty  will not be compromised, we did not fully understand until a letter from then British Ambassador, Mr. Carlton Wheeler, explained that the issue of compromised sovereignty was related to the request of the British to use live ammunitions as part of a training exercise in Guyana’s hinterland, and that the exercise did take place sans the use of live ammunition.
The ensuing perception among many Guyanese observers was that the Jagdeo regime did not want the British police mingling with Guyana’s police or else the British would have detected that the problem with the force and crimes can be traced right to the government.
In fact, Mr. Rohee’s appointment to the present office was the result of his predecessor, Ms. Gail Teixeira, publicly urging Guyanese to boycott businesses run by drug smugglers/dealers. At that time, the Jagdeo regime was downplaying knowledge of such activity or the players.
After all of that, the police force still remains unreformed and none the better when it comes to crime-fighting techniques or even crowd control and dispersion techniques, and the general perception is that the corrupt PPP regime prefers this scenario because it can then use the force as a political weapon.
Second, the writer said that the parliamentary opposition refused to allow the Commission of Inquiry (COI) to also look into how the protests leading to the shooting were organized and whether the manner of the organization of the protest contributed to the tragedy.
Obviously, the hope is to pin blame on the opposition and not the government. But how can the government escape culpability given President Donald  Ramotar’s remarks made in October in Linden on the campaign trail?
He actually told the large gathering at Wismar that with the advent of the Amaila Falls  Hydroelectric Project (AFHEP), government will reduce its subsidization of electricity tariffs for Lindeners. Less than four months later, when the parliamentary opposition decided to implement cuts to the 2012 Budget cuts, the GPL, which has been hemorrhaging financially due to gross mismanagement and ongoing theft of services, was hit.
With the AFHEP not even off  the drawing board, much less completed, the PPP regime then decided to retaliate against APNU for supporting the cuts by going after Lindeners (who voted overwhelmingly for APNU) and brought forward the date for the reduction of electricity subsidy to Linden to July 1, 2012.
No other community was hit with any form of reduced government subsidy or subvention like Linden, so if Peeping Tom really wanted the COI to determine the origin of the protests, all he or she had to do was go right to the Office of the President.
With the eventual passage of a Supplemental Budget that allowed GPL to obtain the funding that was cut earlier, the government postponed the July 1, 2012 deadline and to allow for a team to look into the power generation and electricity distribution issue in Linden. To-date, Lindeners and Guyanese, in general, have no idea what is the status of that team, and nothing the government agreed to with the Linden representatives seems to have materialized.
I said it before and will say it again: the PPP is a cold-hearted, bone-headed party that does not care about Guyana or Guyanese.
Everything it does is designed around its ego-centric leaders who believe it is their divine right to rule and ruin Guyana, regardless of what anyone says or does. It has no respect for the laws of the land or Parliament and certainly does not feel obligated to respect even agreements it has reached with any person or party.
So when Peeping Tom writes that there is no legal or moral basis for the agreement reached between the government and Lindeners to proceed, it is not for the excuses he or she cited; it is just the nature of the political beast called the PPP to do things its way.
But since pressure has always proven to be the only factor the PPP understands and respects, then the people of Guyana must continue pressuring the PPP regime until it does right by Guyana and Guyanese and not Freedom House!
Emile Mervin

 

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