The police and Dr. Ng-A-Qui’s serious joke

Apr 08, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In February, I was a guest on a television programme hosted by Dr. Norman Ng-A-Qui of Channel 9 and the Cuffy 250 Committee, to analyze the industrial action by the unions at the University of Guyana.
During the course of the live discussion, Dr. Ng-A-Qui narrated a joke that though it appeared light, he said, offered a tremendous insight into how freedoms are won and lost. He said a grandson sent two lovely birds to his grandmother. When he came home from the country he was in and went to see his grandmother, he inquired of how the birds were doing. The grandmother told him that they tasted lovely. In shock, he asked what she did with the birds. She cooked and ate them.
In disbelief, he told her he sent the birds to keep her company because the birds can talk, sing, dance and play. The grandmother looked at him and said, “Well son, they didn’t tell me anything.”
On the lighter side, the grandmother was saying that the birds didn’t tell her anything. If they had done so, they would have been alive. On the serious side, the lesson of the joke is if you don’t talk up, if you don’t say something, you will lose your rights and your freedoms.
Under the law, the police cannot just at random stop a car and search its occupants and the car itself. They have to have reasonable suspicion. Reasonable suspicion cannot exist when a car comes out of nowhere and a standing policeman on the road flags it down only to find it has the driver, his aging mother, his wife, his two baby daughters and his dog.
That policeman had to have a reason to stop the car. A police rank cannot just turn around while doing beat duty, see a car coming up the road and stop it. If a policeman does that he is violating your rights. Many times each day, I see those anti-crime police ranks on motorcycles randomly stopping people and searching them. I am simply fed up intervening and have no more energy to confront these ranks.
Guyanese, like the birds, will lose their freedom if they allow criminals, misfits, miscreants and devils at both the junior and senior levels in the police force to abuse them. Thousands of Guyanese, each month, meekly submit to the violations of their physical being and property by depraved personnel of the police force Traffic ranks do hundreds of routine checks daily on the streets when they are not supposed to and sheepish motorists slavishly submit to this oppression.
There was a letter in the press by Rickey Roopchand of the Guyana Rice Producers’ Association, complaining about money the GRA transferred to his account at the GBTI under the Mortgage Interest Relief Scheme, but after a year he was still to receive a cent. The very next day after the publication of his letter, GBTI not only put the money into his account, but sent him a letter of apology.
Mr. Roopchand didn’t stay silent like the birds and got what was rightly his. Had Mr. Roopchand behaved like the cooked birds, his money would have been lost. In the March 1, 2005 edition of the newspapers, Banks DIH put a placement that read; “Very soon, all Demico ice cream flavours will be clearly presented on the lids and containers of all packages.”
This was as a response to two complaints I made in my columns that the flavours were stamped with erasable ink and placed where they cannot be easily read.
The Registrar of the High Court is getting away with cultural murder. He instructed the police ranks at the courts to prevent litigants with loud-coloured clothes from entering the courtrooms. What are loud colours? About twenty times Leonard Craig and I went to see him on the issue but he is never there. Does he work there?

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