Grenade in the night: the Manickchand explanation

Jun 07, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

One week before we observe the death anniversary of Walter Rodney through an explosion from a bomb on June 13, 1980, there came another bomb attempt on the life of another iconic Guyanese, Kaieteur News publisher, Glenn Lall. My vehicle was parked directly opposite Mr. Lall’s on Saffon Street. Lall’s vehicle was on the western side of the street, mine on the eastern side
I left the Dale Andrews’s wake at 8.45 pm. My skin grows when I imagine what would have happened if that grenade had exploded. A fragmentation grenade kills because it buries deep in your physiology, deadly fragments. They pierce your brain, heart. lungs etc. There were dozens of persons at that wake. Sadly this is what Guyana has come to. Since the grenade was thrown on Saturday night, the questions are increasing – who do you think is the source or where do you locate it?
Let me digress to Priya Manickchand. A KN staffer showed me Manickchand’s response to a column I did on her a few days ago. The article exposed her double standards when she was part of the Jagdeo Cabinet. She posted on her Facebook page an image of the long lines outside the passport office last week. I responded by saying the lines were equally long when she was Minister of Social Services and subsequently Minister of Education. I mentioned the time when she called Glenn Lall to object to a column of mine about suffering parents outside her Ministry waiting for school placement.
She called Lall on the phone and Adam Harris joined the conversation. She was annoyed and asked Glenn to demand the evidence from me. In her Facebook page last week, she denied she ever did that. I am calling her a liar. She can sue if she wants to. After she spoke to Lall, I contacted her by phone to assert the position I took in my column. This was July 2012. Manickchand in that 2012 telephonic exchange accused me of wanting to remove the PPP. I replied in the affirmative telling Manickchand that the PPP Government made two attempts on my life.
You know what was Manickchand’s reply? I write on so many people so one will not know who were behind my assaults.
As it turned out, in the first assault in 2010, a confessor implicated PPP officials including Jason Abdulla and Kwame McCoy who have since been charged for the offence. In the second attack, in 2012, my assailant escaped in a black SUV registered to a close PPP security official who was a former police officer. That person was in charge of PPP security arrangements for the 2015 General Elections. From the cloistered rooms of the PPP head office, the Manickchand explanation will be offered as the reason for the grenade attack. Not one single Guyanese will believe it.
My inflexible position is that the actors still reeling from the loss of power, the perpetrators of financial accumulations during the reign of oligarchy, are behind the grenade incident. From the time Mrs. Jagan handed over the presidency to Bharrat Jagdeo in August 1999, the nature of the State deteriorated badly.
The exercise of power was based on raw power. By the time Ramotar was dethroned in the May 2015 General Elections, violently sadistic men with a morbid willingness to use extreme violence had taken over the state machinery.
By “taken over,” I mean they were so clothed in silicone immunity that they felt unrestrained to do whatever they wanted. The Jagdeo/Ramotar cabal had spawned an era of naked power where subordinated members in the corridors of power took orders to kill people and when there weren’t orders, they killed on their own.
Tragically, Courtney Crum Ewing was a victim of this orgy of Hitlerite descent into mindless violence.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, a grenade comes from nowhere and ignites the bloodthirsty pangs of Jaws. On Sunday evening I went into Mr. Lall’s office and solicited an honest opinion from him about going back into the water. That was a metaphorical way of asking if I should continue to go home after 10.30 PM which was a self-imposed restriction prior to 2015 because of my fear of killers in the night.
Lall said that one must not let these people believe they can intimidate the Kaieteur News. He’s right but one must always be on guard every second of the day. The loss of power has brought the loss of mind. The loss of mind has brought the loss of reason. Men without reason have fled to brutish beasts.

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