Ogunseye’s whining comes as no surprise

Oct 31, 2018 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
Mr Tacuma Ogunseye ventured out once again on a frolic of his own in another of his vain attempts to influence public opinion against the PPP/C’s performance in government in general, and in the security sector in particular.
Ogunseye’s lamentations were published in the pages of the Guyana Chronicle – the newspaper that never published the letter he replied to. Ogunseye should forever be grateful to Stabroek News for affording him the opportunity to read letters he responds to.
Ogunseye trotted out the oft-repeated whinings about the PPP’s protection of the so- called ‘phantom gang.’ And like others of his ilk, Ogunseye provided absolutely no evidence to support his claims. On the contrary, he simply repeated what the PNC has been saying for the longest while, but which never gained any traction whatsoever.
Ogunseye’s whining comes as no surprise. A one-time fierce opponent of the PNC, it is easy to understand his behaviour which has been insidiously moulded by the government structure he now dutifully serves.
Ogunseye is one of those who went into government thinking that they would have been able to influence policy along the lines of the WPA. But as far as the PNC was concerned, their use value was just sufficient enough to be used as a battering ram against the PPP/C, with SARA/SOCU as the vehicle to do so.
David Hinds, Ogunseye’s soul mate, was much more politically astute. He chose not to be become a governmentalist. He bailed out before falling victim to, or rather becoming captive of the APNU+AFC’s shackled system of governance which denied him the opportunity to criticize the coalition administration freely and openly.
While Ogunseye has been tethered by government, Hinds has not.
Ogunseye chose to tackle the PPP/C on its crime-fighting record, a platform that was used and abused by the APNU+AFC coalition while in opposition prior to the May 2015 elections.
However, what Ogunseye fails to recognize is the dialectics of change.
Notwithstanding all the vitriol by the coalition administration, claiming while in opposition that it had all the solutions to the crime situation, now that it is in government, it has failed miserably to deliver on its promises.
Since there has been little or no stellar performance in the security sector under the APNU+AFC, the coalition administration must therefore be subjected to the same kind of scrutiny that was meted out to the PPP/C when it was in Government.
Mr. Ogunseye must not give a free pass to the administration he now dutifully serves, especially since they have failed the Guyanese people in so many ways.
Whatever remains of Ogunseye’s moral values, they have become strangely inverted in the intractable political environment in which he now finds himself.
Moreover, since politics is a concentrated form of economics, Ogunseye must know that notwithstanding the misinformation peddled by the APNU+AFC there are certain stark realities obtaining in Guyana.
President Granger in his recent address to the Parliament mentioned that there is 40 percent unemployment among youths in Guyana. Never under the PPP/C administration there were not so many persons selling dog food and bottled water at almost every street corner in the city.
Above all, Mr. Ogunseye consciously overlooks the many incidents of corruption that has hit the ruling coalition in its face in just three years since the PPP/C was removed from office.
Why he chose to ignore the collapse of the African Guyanese village economies which his colleague David Hinds refers to in his writings over and over again, is a matter for him to explain.
Echoing his leader’s pronouncement that “the security sector has become stable from one of past failures,” Ogunseye chose the recent riots at the Lusignan prison to criticize the PPP/C’s track record in the security sector. Sadly, Ogunseye got it all wrong.
Had he done his homework he would have recognized that the challenges facing the security sector did not begin in May 2015, as he would like some to believe.
The PPP/C inherited those challenges way back in 1992 when it assumed office, but it worked diligently and persistently throughout its 23 years in office to address those challenges, so much so that it never experienced such disastrous situations that the APNU+AFC is currently experiencing at the prisons and elsewhere because of bad policies, political interference, a lazy, laid back approach, ineptitude and incompetence at the highest political levels.
Unless Ogunseye comes to grips with these stark realities he will continue to see the Guyanese reality through blinkers, or with blinders, thus he would have failed to truly serve the Guyanese people based on the revolutionary and lofty ideas of Dr. Walter Rodney.
As to why ‘no phantom killer was charged under Rohee’s stewardship’, the answer is simple; they either killed off themselves or were caught by the DEA of the USA for engaging in other illegal activities.
If Ogunseye is aware of other ‘ phantom killers’ who are still out there, irrespective of the geographic location from where they operated, he can either report them to the police or use SARA to live up to its responsibilities.
Yours truly,
Clement J. Rohee

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